THERE have been several stories over the last year or so about the dumping by NSW commercial netters of unwanted estuarine species such as luderick and bream.
While this may not strictly speaking be a “by-catch” issue, the waste of fish like these evokes strong reactions in anglers and I suspect the public generally.
In the past we’ve featured many reports of dead juvenile mulloway in prawn trawl nets, undersized bream and whiting crushed in beach hauls and ending up as pelican food, and blue and black marlin dying on long lines targeting striped marlin, sometimes, allegedly, with the help of a high-powered rifle shot to the head.
All these “by-catch” fish end up dumped, as do fish caught in excess of individual operators’ total allowable catch quotas, including high value but highly vulnerable species such as gemfish.
AFMA has recently invested in Business Intelligence software to help it better manage and detect quota evasion and similar nasty tricks, but that primarily addresses keeping fish above the quota, not dumping.
Faced with similar problems, some years back Iceland determined that over-quota fish caught still had to be iced and landed, but that when they were sold the profits would go to fisheries research. Fisheries research in Australia could certainly benefit from this sort of injection of funds. And of course being faced with having to chill and transport fish for no reward is a pretty strong incentive for operators to avoid areas where the “wrong” species might be known to aggregate.
The European Commission introduced a revamped Common Fisheries Policy on January 1 this year, which states that from January 1 2015 it will be illegal for commercial operators to throw back fish of certain species once they have been caught. These include mackerel, herring, sprat, anchovies and all fish in the Baltic Sea. They have to be landed, which presumably means that operators will fill their quotas faster and fish fewer days.
In Queensland, Fisheries Minister John McVeigh declared a “new area of fisheries management” as a series of consultations commenced in August as part of his government’s shake up of the commercial and recreational sectors. The Queensland Seafood Industry Association quickly responded with a call to allow operators to keep and market by-catch species that current regulations force them to discard.
Tellingly, the Association’s chair has said of by-catch species “Nine times out of 10 when we put them back in the ocean they are either eaten by sharks or other fish or they don’t survive.”
The Association could regret making that statement should the independent consultants managing the consultations decide to recommend the path taken by Iceland or the European Commission.
