Want A Good Workout? Try picking up an 80 pound tuna.

Have you ever seen Shark Wranglers? URI used this boat!

Transferring a yellowfin from the truck to the tank

Poor guy didn't make it, but it was pretty successful otherwise!

So when my colleges do cool things, I just have to get involved. Whether that includes ripping out moose teeth, or sticking my hands up a deer's butt (see my previous blog posts), I always am up for something new and exciting. So, when I found out URI was trying to raise false albacore, bluefin, and yellowfin tuna for spawning and egg rearing, I just had to get involved. After talking to my teacher, a niche was found for me on the URI "Tuna Team". I'm more of an assistant: I clean filters, vacuum the tuna tank, and prepare food for tuna feeding. I do other random things too, but the coolest of all assignments I've had on the team happened on Columbus Day weekend. I had a great weekend visiting friends and family and on Sunday night, I was pretty tired and ready to have Monday morning to sleep in! Around 7:45, I decided it would be a good idea to figure out where the heck my cell phone was at, only to find a text from my friend Chelsea saying "Hey, we are transporting tuna tonight! The boat will be in around 7:30". Instantly, I threw on some rain clothes and boots and headed down to the tank. Prior to Columbus Day weekend, URI's tuna tank held a suite of false albacore and four bluefins. All the fish were no more than 30-40 pounds. The fish that they were transporting were big yellowfin tuna, all between 60-90 pounds! When I arrived at the boat, we instantly got into transporting these tuna. So since the purpose of the research project is to keep the tuna alive, they had to transport them in the least-damaging way possible. So, one of the students was in a wetsuit swimming in the tanks below the boat trying to scoop the tuna up in a bag. These bags are the same bags you see on Animal Planet when people are moving whales, manatees, dolphins, etc. Once they scooped the yellowfins into the bag, the clock was ticking! We got the first tuna, around 85 pounds, and rushed him into the back of the truck on the dock. The truck had a tub in the bed full of water to keep the tuna moist. We drove the truck up to the tank (pretty close to the dock but time was of essence!) and run the bag and the tuna into the tank. After the first tuna was successfully transported, we had four more to go. When we were about to start with the second tuna, our teacher looked at Chelsea and I. "We need to keep an eye on that first tuna!" He told us. That tuna had just basically committed suicide in the boat tank by impinging himself in a corner. Tuna need to have a constant water flow moving across their gills for them to survive, so one of the divers in the tank had to "swim" the tuna to keep him alive. Chelsea and I rushed up the hill to the tank! When we got there, he was laying belly-up on the bottom of the tank. CRAP! We rushed to get a net to try to poke him to get him to move. He was motionless. We then tried to flip him over. Finally, after some serious effort, Chelsea flipped him over and just like that, he started swimming again! So you know how cats have 9 lives? I'm pretty sure tuna have about 60. For the next three hours, Chelsea and I moved ladders around the sides of the tank, moving up and down the ladders flipping this guy over to get him back to life! At midnight though, we decided he probably wasn't going to make it (I mean, we weren't planning on staying there all night to flip the poor guy over). But, the other four tuna were doing wonderful! I got home around 1 AM, soaking wet, and totally exhausted from ladder sprints and tuna flips, but it was such a cool time.