Abstract:
Neritic tuna is a group of pelagic fish which constantly migrated from one habitat to another habitat upon time series. Its migration pattern in the South China Sea is not well defined and attempt was made to identify its movement through tuna tagging project in this area. Five series of tuna tagging programme were conducted in between May 1990 and October 1998 by the Marine Fishery Resources Development and Management Department, SEAFDEC. A total of 23,794 neritic tuna were tagged with tip-pointed plastic dart tags, comprising 14,858 (62.44%) Euihynnus affmis, 8,842 (37.16%) Thunnus tonggol and 94 (0.40%) A ilk is (hazard. By the end of December 1998 a total of 1,044 recoveries had been received, which was 4.39 % of releases, There were 1,024 (98.08%) Euihynnus affmis recoveries, 19 Thunnus tonggol (1.82%) and only 1 Amis thaiard (0.10%). Most of the tags were recovered within the Malaysian waters. Only 8 tags were recovered from the area between the surrounding waters of Malaysia and Thailand.
