THE Tilapia – Raising Awareness in High Risk Areas of the Murray-Darling Basin project has been successfully delivered throughout priority northern Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) catchments to reduce the likelihood of human-aided tilapia incursion into the MDB. Throughout the project the importance of tilapia education, awareness and monitoring was emphasised.
Key activities carried out included:
- Raising community awareness of tilapia through education and engaging fishing clubs, stocking associations, NRM groups, landholders, local governments and pest species management personnel.
- Preventing the spread of tilapia by educating the MDB community and its visitors not to translocate tilapia into the Basin and developing active partnerships with stakeholders.
- Training community members to identify and report tilapia to aid the early detection of MDB incursion.
Notable outcomes:
As a result of this project, community members are demonstrating greater awarenes of the risks of tilapia, relationships with many groups and agencies are developing and partnering with media outlets has effectively reached a large recreation fishing audience in Australia.
The next steps for ensuring the prevention of tilapia incursion include developing cross jurisdictional NSW/QLD incursion response, increase aquarium and aquaculture industry engagement and investigate further use of tilapia interpretational signage across the northern Basin.
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