There is broad evidence of climate change causing shifts in fish distribution worldwide, but less is known about the response of fisheries to these changes. Responses to climate‐driven shifts in a fishery may be constrained by existing management or institutional arrangements and technological settings. In order to understand how fisheries are responding to ocean warming, we investigate purse seine fleets targeting tropical tunas in the east Atlantic Ocean using effort and sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) data from 1991 to 2017.