$736,000 for One Bluefin Tuna

With numbers like this, it's going  to be harder and harder to curtail the harvest of bluefin tuna.  Just a year ago there was a push to severely limit the catch or close fishing all together in an effort to save over fished stocks. Some experts were claiming the species was at a point of no return and unless the kill was halted extinction was inevitable.

MSNBC reported the price on this bluefin tuna at the first auction of the year at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market. It's a record price too.  It beats out last years record of $416,000 paid for one fish.

If you do the arithmetic, this years record breaking tuna comes to $1,238 per pound.

The record price tuna was caught just north of Japan's tsunami-battered coast.  80 percent of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefins caught are consumed in Japan so it stands to reason that Japan opposes efforts to close or limit the tuna harvest as means of protecting the species and increasing its numbers to historic levels.