Total mercury (THg) concentration, fork length, and mass data for bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus), yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), and longnose lancetfish (Alepisaurus ferox) collected from the central and eastern North Pacific between 1971 and 2023

This dataset contains total mercury (THg) concentration, fork length, and mass data for bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus), yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), and longnose lancetfish (Alepisaurus ferox) collected from the central and eastern North Pacific between 1971 and 2023. The THg data for tunas were compiled from published literature. We compared the THg bioaccumulation curve for lancetfish from this study to the bioaccumulation curves for two well-studied tuna species to examine how life history and feeding ecology affect THg accumulation with size.