Exploratory fishing for tunas and tuna tagging in the Marquesas, Tuamotu, Society, Pitcairn, and Gambier Islands

Abstract

The Marquesas Islands are located in the Pacific Ocean at about 9 degrees south latitude and 140 degrees west longitude (Figure 1). It has been demonstrated by tagging (Anonymous, 1980b) that skipjack tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis, which occur in the northeastern Pacific Ocean have migrated to the Hawaiian Islands and Christmas Island in the central Pacific and also to the area between the Marshall and Mariana islands in the western Pacific. The Tuamotu, Society, Pitcairn, and Gambier islands, though the first two are not as close to the principal fishing areas of the eastern Pacific Ocean as are the Marquesas Islands, and the last two are small and isolated, are of interest for the same reasons that the Marquesas Islands are of interest, and thus skipjack should be tagged in those islands for the same reason that they should be tagged in the Marquesas Islands. The organizations which participated in the Marquesas Islands tagging and other scientific activities were the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the South Pacific Commission (SPC), the Centre National pour l'Exploitation des Oceans (CNEXO), the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM), the Service de la Peche de la Polynesie Francaise (SPPF), and the Service de l'Economie Rural (SER).