Atlantic bluefin tuna

Where does the Atlantic bluefin tuna live?

Home: Open Atlantic water and the Mediterranean Sea.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Morocco, Türkiye, the United States, Canada.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: about 2 to 2.5 m long. It weighs about 230 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A bluefin tuna never really stops. It has to keep swimming so that water flows over its gills, and it does that from the day it hatches until the day it dies. Grown fish are often two to two and a half metres long and weigh around 230 kilograms. Special bundles of blood vessels work like a heat exchanger and keep the swimming muscles, the eyes and the brain warmer than the sea, so the tuna can hunt in cold water and still react in a flash. It folds its fins into grooves in its body to slip through the water with less drag. Tuna chase herring, mackerel, sardines and squid, often working together to push a shoal into a tight ball. Once a year they gather to spawn, the eastern fish mostly in the Mediterranean and the western fish in the Gulf of Mexico. After decades of heavy fishing their numbers fell sharply, but catch limits have helped the stocks grow again.

Find it on the globe

Atlantic bluefin tuna is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.