But, you see, among other things, I'm a geography geek. My friends and family know not even to try stumping me with a Geography question in Trivial Pursuit. I practically own the Geography questions. But, for some reason, I didn't know about Mauritius. (Mauritania, sure. Everybody knows where Mauritania is, right?) So, of course, I just had to look up Mauritius in Wikipedia (because, you never know, it just might come up in the next game, and then wouldn't I be embarrassed if I didn't know the answer?)

And what did Wikipedia have to say? Well, among other things, it says, "The island of Mauritius is renowned as the only known home of the dodo." You do remember the dodo, don't you? Well, you could be forgiven if you didn't, since the last known dodo was sighted in 1662, which has to make some kind of record for a species to go from being discovered to going extinct, since the first Europeans only found out about dodos in 1581.

So. Interesting story, with a somewhat sad element in its history, but not ultimately anything which has any direct bearing on my life. Or so I thought.

Later on, I read another story in The Economist, this one about bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean. Apparently, tuna are already down to about a third of the population from 30 years ago, catches are estimated to be twice the set limits, and, to make things worse, organised crime has gotten into the business, so scientists arguing for stricter catch limits to preserve the species are receiving death threats.

From here, it's not hard to foresee the future: governments will probably eventually clue in that something is wrong (much too late), and start putting some teeth into the fishing limits. As the legal catches dwindle in size (because the fishery is approaching exhaustion), the price of tuna will rise, putting even more money in the pockets of organised crime as criminals will continue to poach, no matter how tough the enforcement gets. Eventually, the poaching will drive that population to extinction, with all kinds of impacts on the ecology of the Mediterranean, as the (second) top predator in the food chain will have been removed from the ecosystem. (Among the more easily foreseen scenarios, the populations of the species on which bluefin tuna feed will explode at first, as predator pressure is removed, and then collapse, as overpopulation of those species will, in turn, exhaust the populations of species on which those species feed.)

The same scenario is bound to be repeated around the world, because, well, even people who don't much like fish still tend to like tuna. It's an undeniably tasty fish. I like it a lot, whether in sandwiches, salad, or (best of all) sushi. I even like Tuna Helper, although it's not my favourite way to eat tuna. So it's sad to think that, probably within my lifetime, tuna is bound to go the way of the dodo, because, quite simply, there is nothing governments can do to stop it.

There are, after all, limits to what any government can do. (Not that any government is likely to admit that. As Abraham Maslow once observed, "To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail." So, politicians assume that every problem has a political solution, because that's all they know.) But all it takes for a species to go from endangered to extinct is for there to be enough of economic incentive for poachers to break the law, because organised crime always seems to have enough money to buy faster boats and bigger guns than governments provide to fisheries officials. (Not that I think there's really a military solution, either, although part of me does relish the thought of mafia-backed tuna poachers being blown out of the water by navy jets.)

However, as I got to thinking about the problem, and the probable absence of tuna from anybody's menu a few years from now, I realised that there is a solution after all. Not a political solution, nor a military one, but an economic one. After all, organised crime is only going to be in the poaching business as long as there's profit in it. If nobody was buying tuna, there'd be no profit in poaching, so catch limits would be respected, and the tuna population could recover.

Therefore, I have decided to declare a personal moratorium on eating tuna for the next five years. It's not going to be easy, because I do love it, but its because I love it that I want to see the species survive. It's better to go without for five years (or ten, if necessary) than to see the day when we will all have to go without forever, because there are none left.

I'm tempted to start a campaign calling for everybody to give up tuna for five years, in order to ensure the survival of the species, but, given that I normally get 9-10 hits a day on my blog, I don't see a campaign like that having much of an impact, but I can't stand by and do nothing, so I'm doing what I can. Namely, taking tuna off my personal menu.

But I can't help but wonder what dodo tasted like.