But Iccat's own record on managing the fish is widely seen as unsuccessful: the bluefin population has declined by roughly 80 percent since 1970.
No controls to manage the fish were possible then, but once foreign trawlers had been thrown out in 1976 Iceland was in charge of its seas within a 200 mile limit.
"Right now, I'm not too worried about it showing up in fish, but I'm keeping my eye on it". Lee Nakamura, a partner who manages the fish counter at Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley, Calif., estimated that one in five customers asked about possible radiation, but he had not yet seen an impact on sales.
A decade ago, Andrew Bentley, a scientist who manages the fish collections at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute in Lawrence, received an e-mail asking for help replacing preserved fish specimens destroyed by a fire at a museum in India.
They had benefitted from training on how best to manage the fish stocks and ensure sustainability.
Mr. Miyahara, Japan's top delegate to the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, referred to as Cites, said the convention was the wrong forum for managing the fishing of the bluefin tuna.
The ICCAT, with 47 member countries plus the European Union, is an intergovernmental group responsible for managing the fishing of tunas in the Atlantic but has been sharply criticized for its tendency to place commercial fishing interests above conservation and sustainability values, with Atlantic tuna stocks falling to nearly 60% below the 1970 level by 2008.
A second complementary measure could be to manage the fishing-induced selectivity, which may produce positive outcomes from a human perspective (e.g. evolution of large adult body size as opposed to downsizing of adults, Boukal et al. 2008; Jørgensen et al. 2009; Matsumura et al. 2011).
"I was managed like the fish on the hook," he said.
Despite government assurances that Alaska's Bering Sea pollock fishery the nation's largest commercial fishery is managed sustainably, the fish's population continues to decline.
