Overview of Indian Ocean tropical tuna fisheries

The overarching objective of this summary is to provide participants at the 24^th Session of the IOTC Working Party on Tropical Tunas (WPTT24) with a review of the status of the information available on Indian Ocean tropical tunas and their associated fisheries. The document provides an overview of the data sets available in the IOTC Secretariat databases as of October 2022, the methods used for processing and assessing the reporting quality of the main data sets, and a description of the main trends and features of Indian Ocean tropical tuna fisheries over the last seven decades.

Global catches of tropical tunas living in oceanic habitats, i.e., bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus), skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis), and yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), have steadily increased over the last decades to exceed 5 million metric tons in 2019.

The contribution of the Indian Ocean to the global catch of tropical tuna also increased steadily following the development of the large-scale purse seine fishery from the early 1980s, reaching a maximum of about 28% of the total in the mid-2000s. Levels remained stable at about 20% of total catches in recent years, recording approximately 1 million metric tons in 2019.

Last revised: 20/10/2022