A meeting of over 20 stock assessment scientists from the Asia–Pacific region last week heard that the scientific assessment of tunas in the western and central Pacific Ocean continues to be hampered by some fishing states not making data available to scientists.
Dr Shelton Harley, head of the Stock Assessment and Modeling team within the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Oceanic Fisheries Program noted that “the most frustrating aspect is that the data have been collected and are just sitting on computers in countries and not contributing to the efforts to determine the health and safe harvest levels for the largest tuna resource in the world.”
