July 31, 2024 — Heidi Nydan revved a jagged, bloody reciprocating saw blade to life on Tuesday morning behind a building on Commercial Street, then sent it slashing down the length of a giant bluefin tuna’s decapitated head.
One lifeless, golf ball-sized fish eye stared up at the gray sky as Nydan, an intern at the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab, finished her whirring cut. Half the tuna’s head then hit the pavement with a wet thud.
“This is so fun,” Nydan said, her face splattered with flecks of fish spray. “I still can’t believe this is what I do when I come to work.”
Nydan, and a small team of other workers from the Portland-based lab, spent the morning cutting open 30 donated fish heads, then extracting tiny, fingernail-sized bones from within them. The small bits can reveal a lot about each fish and will eventually inform federal and international policymakers who set quotas and other regulations in the future.
But it takes a lot of itty bitty fish bones to do that. Lab interns and scientists sometimes process up to 2,000 bluefin tuna heads in a single fishing season.