This species is mainly caught by purse-seine, longline and traps. It is also used for commercial fish farming in the Mediterranean Sea.

The eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna stock is taken by a variety of vessels and types of fishing gears, with landing sites located in many countries. The main gears are longline, trap and baitboat for the east Atlantic, and purse-seine, longline and traps for the Mediterranean. Recreational fishing may also be a relevant but unquantified source of fishing mortality on juvenile Bluefin Tuna. The paucity of reliable data from various fisheries has compromised the stock assessments of the eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna stock for many years (see for example SCRS ICCAT 2010, STECF 2009). Size composition data from purse seine fisheries was missing for many years, particularly in the 1990s. For most of the 2000s, tuna farming compounded the problem of obtaining accurate catch and size-composition data because the fish cannot be accurately sampled until harvesting, which takes place from four months to several years after the fish are caught in the wild. The accuracy of overall catches has also been affected over time by under-reporting or over-reporting associated with quotas. In addition, data on juvenile Bluefin Tuna catches from the Mediterranean were also unavailable for many years. Since 2008, ICCAT has adopted several measures that should address these concerns, such as an increase in minimum size, and 100% observer coverage on purse seiners and transfers of fish to cages. However, despite the expectation that these measures will improve fishery statistics, substantial gaps remain in the historical data used for stock assessments.

In the western Atlantic, the fishery is conducted by the US, Canada and Japan. There are concerns over the potential impacts on the 2010 year class from the Deep Horizon oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico between April–August of that year (Campagna et al. 2011, Richards 2011).