In the pitch blackness before dawn one morning in late may, four boats belonging to Diego Crespo Sevilla chug out of a port in southwest Spain to enact an elaborate marine ambush. About 50 fishermen drop hundreds of red markers, attached to nets, which bob for nearly 2 km along the water's surface, forming rows as neat as traffic lanes on a highway. Then they maneuver their boats to form a wide square, and they wait. As the sun rises an hour

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) later, a drama begins to unfold. Nearly 200 huge tuna glide through the lanes until they find themselves trapped atop a net that the fishermen have connected between their boats.

The tuna thrash about wildly in a desperate search for escape, but the captains have already edged their vessels into a far tighter square, sealing off all exits. One by one, the exhausted fish die, their bodies banging against the boats, and their blood turns the water red. On the deck of one boat, Sevilla, clearly delighted, whips out his mobile phone and calls in the day's estimated catch to his managers in Barbate, so that they can negotiate with Japanese buyers waiting in the harbor. The fishermen whoop in delight as cranes hoist their catch onto the boats. "This is our best day this year," says one, adding: "You brought us luck."

Some version of that scene has been going on for thousands of years in and around the Mediterranean Sea. Fishermen on Spain's 4,000-km Mediterranean coast have hunted tuna since ancient times; Roman imperial soldiers based near Barbate packed dried tuna loin and tuna eggs in their kits as a portable source of protein. But a global scramble for bluefin tuna and the world's changing eating habits is threatening the sea's stock of the species. Environmentalists and marine biologists predict that this year approximately 50,000 tons of tuna will be caught in the Med. That represents thousands of jobs — at least 5,000 in Spain's traditional tuna-trapping business alone — and over 50% of the global market for bluefin tuna, a staple of the world's sushi restaurants.

Appetite

But the jubilation of Sevilla and his colleagues may not last. Like many of the Med's fishermen, life has become far more precarious for them, as they struggle to compete against international companies. As the blistering afternoon sun beats down, the fishermen of Garrucha (pop. 8,000) pull their boats into the harbor with the day's catch, and gather in a café on the dockside. Over coffee they talk for hours. "Fuel prices have risen, and fish prices are really low. We wonder if it is worth it anymore," says Juan Cervantes, 55, who began fishing on his father's boat at age 14, married a local girl at 17, and supported their four children by hauling fish from the Mediterranean. "My father fished. My grandfather fished. Many generations before them fished," says Cervantes, who is president of Spain's federation of about 38,000 fishermen. "But this generation: it is all different."

Were Cervantes ever to sail his boat around the Mediterranean's 46,000-km coastline, he would hear similar tales in languages from Arabic to Italian. The 22 countries that border the Med face a battle over resources that raises a stark question: To what extent can traditional lifestyles and economic activities coexist with a global appetite for the produce of the Mediterranean region?

Few events so eloquently capture the tussle between international commerce and the locals over the Mediterranean's resources as the annual summer hunt for bluefin tuna. Much of the Med's tuna is no longer caught by traditional means. High-tech "tuna ranches" began appearing in the Med in the late '90s and have proliferated over the past decade — fish farms consisting of circular floating cages about 50 m in diameter and 50 m deep, set up 2-3 km from shore. The ranches are most often controlled not by small European operators but by large multinational corporations. In the cages, tuna fatten up on smaller fish, often for months at a time, before they are slaughtered and shipped off to Japan — the market for nearly 80% of the Mediterranean bluefin catch. The new large-scale ranches have wreaked havoc with the traditional fishermen's earnings. "The European market has totally changed in just two or three years," says Sevilla, director of Almadrade Capo Plata, one of Spain's few remaining traditional tuna-trapping companies.

To combat the tuna ranches, Sevilla and other trappers need to halt their prey long before it reaches the Mediterranean's open water. From late May, shoals of tuna begin their annual migration from the Atlantic through the Strait of Gibraltar, before spending one month breeding in the Med's temperate water. The traditional fishermen's contest against the industrial ranches has become so fierce during the past few years that some marine biologists and environmental activists fear it could threaten the very survival of the Mediterranean bluefin. The volume of tuna caught in the Mediterranean has soared in just a few years. Indeed, it tripled between the summer of 2002 and late last year, according to a report last November by Advanced Tuna Ranching Technologies (ATRT), a consultancy firm in Madrid.

Why? Blame the worldwide taste for sushi. European Union fishing subsidies haven't helped, either — they enable fishermen to buy new boat engines, the better to compete against the high-tech fleets that have set up in the Mediterranean. Many Spanish and French fishing companies have used the subsidies to overhaul their fleets, installing sonar systems and new engines and hugely increasing capacity. "Fishermen used to have old wooden boats, but now most boats in the Mediterranean are brand new," says Alain Fonteneau, a marine biologist for the French government-run Institute of Development Research in Montpellier. Other technologies have contributed; tuna-ranching companies fly spotter planes throughout May over prime breeding grounds off Algeria, Libya and Turkey to track shoals of tuna. (During the rest of the breeding season, the flights are banned by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas [iccat], which sets international rules.)

Collapsing

Convinced that countries are fishing the Mediterranean's stock into extinction, the wwf last year commissioned industry consultants to calculate the real tonnage of tuna catches. Its findings, released earlier this month, show widespread violations of the Mediterranean's iccat quota of 32,000 tons a year, mostly by industrial companies whose farm-fattened exports escape rigid scrutiny. Bill Hogarth, the chairman of iccat, says he finds the wwf findings convincing. "If we continue like this the stock will crash," says Hogarth, who heads the U.S. government's fisheries service at the Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Hogarth blames lax European government enforcement — the E.U. has only 25 fishing inspectors to monitor national inspection procedures all across Europe — and the eagerness of poor North African countries to join the global tuna trade. "It's like a poor man's Lotto," Hogarth says. "I've seen one tuna sell for $60,000."

Despite such sums, prices on Europe's docksides have plummeted from about €10 per kg five years ago to as little as half that today. Paradoxically — you might think that a collapsing price indicated an expanding supply — environmental groups believe that reflects massive overfishing. With fish, excessive harvesting can drive down the price until stocks suddenly run out. "It's like in a war," says Roberto Mielgo Bregazzi, chief executive officer for ATRT, who authored the wwf report. "You can kill 1 million people the first year, 2 million the next year, 20 million people the year after that. Eventually you will end the war because there will be no more people to kill."

European officials blame Asian shipping companies, which skirt quota rules by transferring tuna directly from industrial ranches in the Mediterranean to Japan-bound ships, without ever touching land and without reporting the size of their catch. "We cannot monitor it," says a European Commission official in Brussels. Tuna-ranching companies have become sensitive to environmental criticism. Spain's largest company, Ricardo Fuentes and Sons, declined to speak to Time, as did Azzopardi Fisheries in Malta, which controls some of the Mediterranean's richest breeding grounds. A.J.D. Tuna Limited, which Azzopardi owns with Japanese partners, says on its website that since industrial fish farming is essential to feed the world's population, "we are constantly working to try and reduce the impact of our industry on the environment." The company says it operates its fish farms only half the year in order to conserve the sea's stocks. "We Japanese don't fish anymore, we only buy from other people," says a Japanese buyer who works for another company, checking the quality of the tuna as it is off-loaded at Sevilla's refrigerated warehouse in Barbate, and who refused to be named. "That is because [in Japan] we have nothing left to fish."

Environmentalists want the rules tightened. At iccat's next meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in November, environmental groups and the U.S. will be attempting to crack down on overfishing. But Bregazzi is gloomy. "You are talking to a very pessimistic man," he says. "Bluefin tuna is on the verge of collapse, if not collapsing as we speak."

Wrangling

The debate over who controls the Mediterranean's resources goes beyond fishing. About 30% of the world's shipping passes through the Mediterranean. "Oil pollution from ships is a major problem," says Paul Mifsud, coordinator of the United Nations Environment Program's Mediterranean Action Plan, which is headquartered in Athens. About 100,000-150,000 tons of oil is spilled into the Mediterranean every year from accidents and operational dumping by ships, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council, which monitors ocean oil spills. Industrial waste, too, pollutes the waters. Egyptians have long called their port city, Alexandria, the jewel of the Mediterranean, but it has lately earned another reputation as "the outstanding champion of pollution," according to Mifsud. Factories dump waste water into the port's bays and into Lake Maryut, 1 km from the sea. Egypt's government blames the cargo traffic from the Suez Canal and oil tankers from the Persian Gulf. "We not only have to manage Egypt but the whole world's waste," says Mohammed Borhan, director general of coastal and maritime zone management for the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency.

Pollution, like overfishing, threatens fish stocks in the Med — and traditional fishing communities. Hundreds of thousands of people around the Mediterranean make their living from the sea, and E.U. officials believe a crash in fish stocks would impact many towns and villages. At the same time, the E.U. is trying to save fish by coaxing fishermen into other professions. After years of political wrangling, the European Commission agreed last month on a €3.8 billion, seven-year program to help fishermen shift into other industries. E.U. funds currently help fishermen retire at 55 and pay to train them for new careers in tourism.

Whatever the economic incentives to change their ways, in many small towns there is a sense of a way of life passing away — often yielding to an easier, more lucrative modern existence. In Garrucha, old men fish; their sons do not. "There are other options now," says Cervantes, the fishermen's federation president. For fishermen, perhaps. But for the tuna?

• VIVIENNE WALT / Barbate
• Livelihoods — and tuna stocks — are under threat from industrial fishing companies and an international passion for sushi