California bluefin tuna with Fukushima cesium

Head Researcher: California bluefin tuna with Fukushima cesium from Japan- Migrate to California Coast

EneNews.com

Dan Madigan, Stanford University: [...] so in 2011, the fish we measured — because we didn’t know what we’d see and we weren’t really convinced we’d see anything — we only measured 15 fish, and what was amazing was that we found it in all 15 bluefin tuna that we looked at. These were known from their size to be migrants from Japan, so they had only by the nature of when we sampled them and how long it takes them to cross the Pacific, we know they’d only been in the water around Japan for at most two months, probably less, maybe less than a month. So our big simple question was what will bluefin look like that migrate over this year that have spent their entire life from egg stage growing up in the waters off Japan? The concentrations of radioactivity had decreased, but the amount of time the animals have to spend in that water before they make their long migrations has increased. So we really don’t know what to expect. And there’s many other species that use those waters off Japan and migrate long distances, and as of now none of them have been looked at, and again people really want to know what species are carrying this radioactivity and which aren’t, and that’s what we’re trying to do.