The fisheries council based in Honolulu is blaming the purse seine fishery for the reduced bigeye tuna stock in Pacific waters.
Ahead of a regional meeting next week to discuss proposed new restrictions on all fisheries, the Hawai'i fleet says the longline fisheries mostly fish outside the conservation zone near the equator.
The longline fishery says it's tragic that the purse seine vessels, which don't target bigeye tuna, damage the stocks more by taking in juveniles with fish aggregation devices.
A senior scientist, Paul Dalzell, says this accounts for about 85 percent of the bigeye tuna caught in conservation zones.
"The bigeye catch in the purse seine fisheries is an incidental catch. They're targeting skipjack and to some extent yellowfin, and we have to get that catch down, somehow. Otherwise we are going to be continuing to have a reduced Maximum Sustainable Yield for bigeye and all the cuts in the world in longline fisheries will still not address overfishing of the stock."
Paul Dalzell.
The Tuna Commission will meet in Cairns on Monday.
