Tuesday | April 21, 2015 About Us | Contact | Subscribe
Radioactive tuna from Fukushima?  LOS ANGELES — Marine biologist
Dan Madigan stood on a dock in San Diego and considered some
freshly caught Pacific bluefin tuna. The fish had managed to
swim 5,000 miles from their spawning grounds near Japan to
California’s shores, only to end up the catch of local
fishermen.  It was August 2011, five months since a magnitude-9
earthquake and tsunami had struck in Japan, crippling the
Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Madigan couldn’t stop thinking
about pictures he’d seen on TV of Japanese emergency crews
dumping radioactive water from the failing reactors into the
Pacific Ocean.       Maybe the fish could still tell their
story.    “It’s black water, and all of a sudden you have a huge
animal,” said Madigan, a Long Island, N.Y., native who camps on
the weekends and catches all of the fish he eats. “Why? Why now?
And why here?”  Intrigued, Madigan enrolled in a doctoral
program at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Sta