Dear Editor, I am loathe to take up the pen again on the issue of the tuna fishery resources in and around Cook Islands waters, but since I’ve been referenced in Mr. Tylor’s latest effort please indulge me this reply (More questions than answers, Cook Islands News, May 30, 2024).

Firstly, if Mr. Tylor considers my original response to be ‘angry’ then he clearly doesn’t know me very well ... haha! If anything, there may have been a hint of frustration perhaps, since Rueben has been going on about the collapse of our southern tuna resources for at least the last 30 years.

With all due respect to him, for me it starts to resemble a debate with a flat-earther after a while. For the record, I like Reuben personally and have a lot of respect for what he has achieved, both in the offshore finance industry and tourism here in the Cook Islands.

Secondly, I was never suggesting there was two genetically discrete biological stocks of yellowfin tuna found in our waters, so if that was the impression I gave then please let me clarify a little further. What I was trying to say was that purse seiners, on the odd occasion they actually fish in our northern waters, target schooling stocks of mixed skipjack and small juvenile yellowfin, often around floating rafts placed in the water to attract them. Such schooling stocks are not typically found in large numbers in subtropical waters, therefore purse seiners tend to limit their fishing activities to equatorial region, which has very different environmental conditions (currents, thermocline, SSTs etc) than what we typically see down south here around Rarotonga. I am not going to start rehashing points I already covered earlier for this, so I’ll leave it there.

Suffice to say that these are not the observations of myself alone, but based on well-established scientific understanding over decades of data collection and analysis at a region-wide level. On the other hand, Mr. Tylor’s hypothesis appears to assume that juvenile yellowfin tuna reside in northern Cook Islands waters, with some staying until they reach maturity (some 4-5 years), and then swimming due south for one reason or another, and that this movement is unduly impacted by said sporadic fishing in our northern waters. There is no science that I’m aware of which supports the notion of such extended residency, nor indeed of any large scale regular patterns of migration of these tuna due south.

His view also does not appear to place any weight whatsoever on the far heavier fishing pressure that occurs in the neighbouring island states and high seas areas to the north-west or north-east of us in the IATTC region.

Lastly, can I just gently remind Reuben again that MMR (Ministry of Marine Resources) has not made ‘serious mistakes’ in its management of the Cook Islands tuna resources. It makes decisions based on sound scientific advice provided by SPC (Pacific Community), and contributes actively to the collective management of our ‘highly migratory’ (emphasis added) tuna resources as part of the regional Forum Fisheries Agency. The Ministry does not act in a vacuum and neither for that matter does the tuna. I would direct Reuben to the Privy Council findings on this issue – I think he would find that very useful reading.

Nevertheless, I look forward to reading Reuben’s next instalment with the same breathless anticipation that I’m sure your other readers have on his observations of our fishery!

Kia manuia,

Josh Mitchell