IN the wide expanse of the wild ocean, there is perhaps nothing more wild than the world’s largest tuna  the giant Atlantic bluefin. Equipped with a kind of natural GPS system that biologists have yet to decode, the bluefin can cross and recross the Atlantic’s breadth multiple times in the course of its life. Its furious metabolism enables the fish to sprint at more than 40 miles an hour, heat its muscles 20 degrees above ambient, and hunt relentlessly at frigid depths in excess of 1,500 feet.

Yet in spite of all of its unwieldy and feral characteristics, aquaculture scientists have just announced an important step toward converting the Atlantic bluefin, in rapid decline in the wild, into a farm animal. Researchers at a European Union-financed program, Selfdott, said they had succeeded in spawning the Atlantic bluefin in captivity without hormonal intervention.

If they can solve the problem of raising the offspring to adulthood  a challenging prospect  the bluefin may soon join Atlantic salmon, rainbow trout, branzino, yellowtail, turbot, shrimp, catfish and tilapia as an industrially farmed staple of the modern fish market. Which brings up an interesting question: Can a farmed version of bluefin tuna be better for the earth  and the species?

The potential taming of the Atlantic bluefin highlights an epochal shift. Seafood today is roughly where landfood was 10,000 odd years ago. Just as Neolithic humans launched a domestication project after the last Ice Age and eventually replaced many wild mammal populations with tame ones, so, too, are modern humans parsing and domesticating the ocean, fish by fish.