Rapid response to abalone virus depletion in western Victoria: information acquisition and reef code assessment

Future management of disease-affected abalone must adapt to the changing circumstances, and adopting a precautionary approach will allow maximum potential for stock recovery. This approach is mandated by the observation that no documented examples are known of abalone populations recovering from catastrophic impacts such as have occurred in the abalone fisheries of Victoria's Western and Central zones. Indeed the balance of international evidence points towards the contrary, so these fisheries are in dangerous territory. This need not mean that recovery cannot occur. However, the modelling results from this project confirm the above precautionary view and suggest that unless it is known with certainty that disease-induced mortalities have been moderate (less than 40%), then any resumption of fishing in the near term risks the future of the fishery. Acquisition of accurate mortality data is the only basis upon which fishing can recommence in the short term (within 5 years) and in many instances, such as for some among those reefs considered in our study, the opportunity has passed. The simulation results provide guidance, but their validity is conditional on myriad assumptions as well as on the accuracy of data employed. We already know that catches early in the fishery’s history were higher than reported officially, but how much higher is conjecture. Growth is highly variable over small spatial scales and feedback effects from reduced abundance together with changed size structure and persistence of habitat will play roles in determining the rate, if any, of recovery. The extent of the contemporary illegal catch is uncertain, particularly given the unprecedented closure of the fisheries. The results show that even small illegal catches can significantly degrade recovery where the viral impact is high, with clear implications for the enforcement aspects of managing these fisheries

Inclusion of ecological, economic, social, and institutional considerations when setting targets and limits for multispecies fisheries

Targets and limits for long-term management are used in fisheries advice to operationalize the way management reflects societal priorities on ecological, economic, social and institutional aspects. This study reflects on the available published literature as well as new research presented at the international ICES/Myfish symposium on targets and limits for long term fisheries management. We examine the inclusion of ecological, economic, social and institutional objectives in fisheries management, with the aim of progressing towards including all four objectives when setting management targets or limits, or both, for multispecies fisheries. The topics covered include ecological, economic, social and governance objectives in fisheries management, consistent approaches to management, uncertainty and variability, and fisheries governance. We end by identifying ten ways to more effectively include multiple objectives in setting targets and limits in ecosystem based fisheries management

Ocean's eleven: a critical evaluation of the role of population, evolutionary and molecular genetics in the management of wild fisheries

Significant changes have occurred in the well-established partnership between fisheries managers and geneticists over the last 50 years. It is therefore timely to review and recalibrate the ways in which genetic technologies can assist the fishing industry to maintain productive and sustainable harvests. Our objective is to contribute to the mutual understanding of all stakeholders in the genetics–management partnership. Genetic technologies that are relevant to fisheries management are grouped into eleven themes, which are described in plain language for a non-specialist audience. The role that the genetic information plays in fisheries management is explained, along with an assessment of the challenges and barriers that may be preventing the uptake of the information into the fisheries management process. The compelling conclusion is that genetics offers a diverse collection of versatile and useful tools for informing fisheries managers about issues that have a biological basis. Presently, mainstream use of genetic tools focuses on a narrow set of fisheries management issues, but the diversity of genetic tools and the novel issues they can address indicates that uptake will grow, particularly as communication between geneticists and end-users improves

An integrated monitoring program for the Northern Prawn Fishery: Assessing the design and developing techniques to incorporate survey results into fishery assessment

An international review of the Northern Prawn Fishery tiger prawn assessment was carried out in 2001. The review drew attention to the high level of uncertainty in the assessment and recommended that the logbook data be augmented by fishery independent survey data. In response to the review, industry funded a consultancy project in 2002 to investigate and design an integrated monitoring program for the NPF. Following an industry meeting, NORMAC decided to conduct a one-year pilot survey in 2002/03. The project (FRDC 2002/101) was funded through the FRDC, and included a spawning index survey in August and a recruitment index survey in January. The success of the pilot project led to a FRDC-funded monitoring project (FRDC 2003/075) in 2003/04 and this project (FRDC 2004/099) in 2004/05. Two surveys were undertaken during the 2004/05 financial year

Choosing a fishery's governance structure using data poor methods

Multi-species fisheries are complex to manage and the ability to develop an appropriate governance structure is often seriously impeded because trading between sustainability objectives at the species level, economic objectives at the fleet level, and social objectives at the community scale, is complex. Many of these fisheries also tend to have a mix of information, with stock assessments available for some species and almost no information on other species. The fleets themselves comprise fishers from small family enterprises to large vertically integrated businesses. The Queensland trawl fishery in Australia is used as a case study for this kind of fishery. It has the added complexity that a large part of the fishery is within a World Heritage Area, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which is managed by an agency of the Australian Commonwealth Government whereas the fishery itself is managed by the Queensland State Government. A stakeholder elicitation process was used to develop social, governance, economic and ecological objectives, and then weight the relative importance of these. An expert group was used to develop different governance strawmen (or management strategies) and these were assessed by a group of industry stakeholders and experts using multi-criteria decision analysis techniques against the different objectives. One strawman clearly provided the best overall set of outcomes given the multiple objectives, but was not optimal in terms of every objective, demonstrating that even the "best" strawman may be less than perfect. © 2012

A retrospective evaluation of sustainable yields for Australia's Northern prawn fishery

The fundamental aim in fisheries management is to determine an optimal fishing effort for sustainably harvesting from a replenishable resource. The current management objective of Australia’s Northern Prawn Fishery is to maximize the long-term net economic return following Australian government policy, resulting in an average recent catch of tiger prawn species of about 1,250 tons only. However, the maximum sustainable catch stated from different studies is around 3,000– 4,700 tons. We also evaluated the net profit assuming that there was no buyback scheme in 2005 and the fishing fleet was kept at 89 vessels since 2005 and concluded that 40% more catch on average (2006–2009) and an additional total profit of A$17 million (excluding crew cost) could have been gained in addition to the many millions of dollars of savings in the buyback scheme. These findings have great implications for future management in Australia and elsewhere because there is a grave concern of overfishing worldwide