Bigeye tuna tagging!

Here it is the largest migration of the bigeye tunas we tagged last year and a small story of that day.

“It was the third day fishing with our good friend Alar from Estonia and the sea conditions were beyond perfect. The day was very slow though, but right on the way back we spotted a huge splash on the water about 3 miles from us. We fast change the course of the boat and although everything was calm when we arrived there, we fast got tight on two giant bigeye tunas. One of the fishes pulled the hook after a few seconds, but the other one gave to Alar the fight of his life. 1h30 later Miguel grabs the leader and just starts yelling “that’s a gigantic bigeye tuna!”
Everything was prepared for the tagging, we put the fish on the tagging cradle, measured it, tagged it, took several pictures and released it.”

The fish had 192 cm fork length (~ 155 kg/340 pounds) and might be the largest bigeye tuna ever tagged in the entire world. Four months later the tag comes up and the fish is at latitude 0 in the equatorial Atlantic after having traveled more than 4000 km. Just amazing!

Again, we can not thank enough all the anglers that agreed in releasing their fishes with satellite tags. Altogether, we are definitely contributing to the conservation of this iconic and threatened species!

Next year we have a few more tags to deploy, so be ready tunas!