Maldives pole-and-line skipjack tuna🎣

All the tuna from this fishery is caught using traditional pole-and-line methods, using one hook on a line attached to a bamboo pole, catching one fish at a time. Most fishing vessels employ a crew of about 20-30 fishers, and they catch small, live fish to use as bait for the tuna close to shore. Once the live bait is caught, vessels travel out to the open water searching for schools of tuna using binoculars and relying on sightings of birds and/or dolphins. Flocks of birds hovering above the surface of the ocean are good indicators of feeding schools of fish, and fishers have used these sightings to locate tuna for hundreds of years. Once located, the fishers use the live bait fish to keep the tuna swimming around the boat in a frenzy, which helps when landing the fish on their hooks. The boats also sprays water off the back of the vessel onto the surface of the ocean, to mimic the action of fish being chased by predators, which also helps to attract the tuna. Fishers lower their lines into the water and wait for a tuna to get hooked on the end, before pulling the fish up onto the boat. Non-target species (also known as bycatch) are animals that the fishery doesn’t want to catch, such as dolphins, turtles or sharks. The use of a single hook and line per fisher means that there is very little bycatch, and because fishing takes place at the surface of the ocean, there is virtually no negative impact on different marine habitats. Once the tuna are on board, they are placed on ice immediately and taken into shore where they are either exported frozen, or processed in one of the factories