September 27, 2019 — Molly Lutcavage is standing on the State Fish Pier in Gloucester, watching a crane hoist a giant bluefin tuna off the back of a fishing boat.
“Look at how skinny she is,” the fisherman, Corky Decker, yells up to her. “That’s how they’ve all been — long, ugly things like you’d catch in June.”
Lutcavage nods at the fish, which is 74 inches long but weighs just 174 pounds — very skinny indeed for a tuna — then looks down at the plastic bag in her hands, which is what she’s come for. It contains the tuna’s ovaries, and Lutcavage, director of the Large Pelagics Research Center, hopes it can support a theory she first proposed two decades ago — one that would be good news for the health of the tuna population as a whole, and help explain the bad news that has plagued commercial tuna fishing this season, with poor-quality meat fetching record low prices.
Lutcavage believes that younger tuna have been spawning off the coast of New England, an idea that runs counter to the accepted belief that tuna in this part of the world spawn only in the Gulf of Mexico, and only when mature.
If Lutcavage is right, it would mean there are more tuna contributing to the population, and thus the population is larger and healthier than fishery managers and conservation advocates believe.