According to WWF Canada, excessive bycatch* of cod is undermining the cod moratorium imposed in 1994. On the southern Grand Banks near Canada, cod bycatch is now at least 70 percent higher than target levels and this is hampering the recovery of one the world’s best known fisheries.

WWF Canada also states that ships from the European Union are responsible for the largest proportion of the overrun bycatch.

In 2003, bycatch amounts were estimated to be over 80 per cent of the remaining cod stock which caused WWF to push for a 2008 cod recovery strategy that included setting a bycatch reduction target of 40 per cent for the southern Grand Banks at the September 2007 annual meeting of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO).

The 40 percent target level was based on estimations of how much the cod population could endure and still have at least some chance of recovery. 40 percent is equivalent of 420 tonnes of cod, but unofficial fishing statistics for the year 2008 show that almost twice as much, 713 tonnes, was caught as bycatch last year. Of these 713 tonnes, ships from the European Union member states accounted for 444 tonnes.

It should be noted that these figures does not account for misreported bycatch and illegal fishing.

WWF Canada is now urging NAFO to adopt an effective recovery plan for southern Grand Banks cod; one hat will include immediate bycatch reduction targets as well as long-term recovery goals. Gear-based solutions need to be combined with protection of spawning and nursery areas for the plan to be effective and the arrangements must naturally be backed by efficient monitoring and enforcement to have any effect. Such a recovery plan would be consistent with the Ecosystem management approach adopted in the newly revised NAFO Convention.

“Cod and other fish stocks can never recover as long as NAFO refuses to see the urgency of the bycatch problem and acknowledge that voluntary measures are not working,” says Dr. Robert Rangeley, Vice President Atlantic, WWF-Canada. “If NAFO’s Scientific Council starts working on solutions at their June meeting then it will be the responsibility of the Fisheries Commission, in September, to impose strict management measures that will give cod recovery a chance.”

* Bycatch is here defined as unused and unmanaged catch. You can find more information about bycatch in “Defining and Estimating Global Marine Fisheries Bycatch”; a paper co-authored by WWF for the journal Marine Policy. According to this paper, the global bycatch now constitutes over 40 percent of the global reported catch.

This Thursday, the Anchorage-based North Pacific Fishery Management Council[1] approved an unprecedented plan to ban commercial fishing in the Arctic Ocean, as a part of their Arctic Fishery Management Plan. The council voted 11-0 in favour of the plan, which essentially bans all commercial fishing from the Canadian border down to the Bering Strait, and it is now up to the U.S. Commerce secretary to approve or reject the ban.

Before approving the ban, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council spent two years developing an Arctic Fishery Management Plan in response to global warming and the retreat of sea ice along Alaska’s northern coast. As of today, fishing is not carried out on any major scale in the Arctic Ocean, but commercially interesting species like crab and pollock may expand in this part of the sea and this could make the area attractive for fishing fleets. The council therefore decided to develop a plan in advance to be prepared for any future developments.

Environmentalists and fishing industry groups alike have praised the Arctic Plan, since both parties recognize the need to enforce strong management control over the Arctic Ocean. We still know very little about life in this remote part of the world and the few fish stock surveys that has been carried out in these waters has not managed to find any larger fish populations. The area could be opened up for regulated commercial fishing in the future, if more thorough research of the Arctic Ocean would show that sustainable fishing could be carried out without injuring the ecosystem.

“Climate change is having a significant effect on the Arctic, opening previously ice-covered waters and drawing cold-water species farther north,” says Dave Benton of the Alaskan Marine Conservation Alliance[2]. “The council’s action to close these waters as a precautionary measure gives us the opportunity to conduct the scientific review necessary to develop a plan for how sustainable fisheries might be conducted in the Arctic in the future.“

This year, fishermen in the southern ocean of Australia report seeing more tuna than in 20 years. They report not only bigger catches, but also that the average tuna is about 20% lager than previous years.

Australian Tuna Association chief executive Brian Jeffries says: “There’s a lot more fish out there than there has been in the past 10 years and the fish are bigger in that period.”

This leads some to believe that the tuna population is recovering and that it has been doing so since 2006 when it was discovered that Japanese boats were catching 40,000 tonnes of southern blue fin tuna illegally each year and had been doing so for at least 20 years. The discovery lead to a crack down on Japanese illegal fishing and the illegal fishing in the region has, although still preset, dramatically dropped since 2006.

Is the tuna population in the Southern Ocean starting to recover, or is this just a sign of an imminent collapse – similar to the good years that preceded the cod collapse in the Atlantic? Only the future can tell.

This story might be a few days old but is still of interest and as I haven’t been able to get to it sooner I decided to post about it today.

Indonesia will allow trawling in selected areas for the first time in 30 years, maritime ministry official Bambang Sutejo announced on January 15. Trawling will be allowed off four areas of Indonesia East Kalimantan province, despite concerns about overfishing.

“There will not be overfishing this time as we’re only allowing small boats to trawl, and it’s not allowed in other parts of Indonesia,” says Sutejo, adding that legalising trawling would help fight illegal trawlers.

According to Chalid Muhammad of the independent Green Institute, trawling has a destructive impact on the marine environment and will intensify the problem with overfishing in Indonesian waters. “The total amount of fish caught is getting smaller each day while their imports are getting bigger,” says Muhammad.

Muhammad also feels a legalization of trawling will embarrass Indonesia as it prepares to host the World Ocean Conference. “If the government allows this, Indonesia will have a weak standing during the World Ocean Conference as sustainable management of marine resources will be discussed,” Muhammad said. The World Ocean Conference is an international gathering of policymakers and scientists held in May 2009.

Kalimantan is the Indonesian portion of the island Borneo, the third largest island in the world, and is divided into four provinces: East Kalimantan, West Kalimantan, South Kalimantan, and Central Kalimantan.

What is trawling?

Trawling is a fishing practise where fishing boats tow long nets behind them. These nets do not only scoop up commercially valuable fish, but all sorts of marine life. Trawling is divided into bottom trawling and midwater trawling, depending on where in the water column the trawling takes place. Bottom trawling is especially harmful to marine environments since it can cause severe incidental damage to the sea bottoms and deep water coral reefs.

A new subfamily has been created within the catfish family Loricariidae, the largest family of catfish and currently home to over 700 described species. The new subfamily has been named Otothyrinae and its members include the genera Corumbataia, Epactionotus, Eurycheilichthys, Hisonotus, Microlepidogaster, Otothyris, Otothyropsis, Parotocinclus, Pseudotothyris, and Schizolecis.

The new subfamily was named in a study published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution[1]. Juan Montoya-Burgos, Márcio Chiachio and Claudio Oliveira – the researchers behind the article – have studied the molecular phylogeny of the subfamilies Hypoptopomatinae and Neoplecostominae in the family Loricariidae. They decided to name a new subfamily after taking a closer look at the phylogeny of the fish using a partial sequence of the nuclear F-reticulon4 gene.

In addition to the nuclear F-reticulon4 gene, Burgos, Chiachio and Oliviera used morphological evidence to decide which catfish species that should be placed in the new subfamily, and the study has also examined the historical biogeography of the group.

Lobsters caught in the Northumberland Strait in eastern Canada are normally black, so it is easy to imagine the surprise fisherman Danny Knockwood of the Elsipogtog First Nation must have felt when he suddenly found himself face to face with a yellow and white specimen. Knockwood made the unusual catch while pulling his traps out of the sea near Richibucto Village, where the Richibucto Rivers empties into the northern Atlantic.

The Canadian fishermen named his new pet Autumn and made a short video of the animal for YouTube. As of October 8, the video had managed to attract several hundred viewers – some of them suggesting that Knockwood should eat his rare find.

Knockwood has however decided to keep Autumn away from the boiling water and has instead managed to find her a new home at the Aquarium and Marine Centre in Shippagan, a museum where marine animals are housed in real seawater. The marine centre is already home to a substantial collection of oddly coloured lobsters, so Autumn will fit right in.

“In captivity, the lobster could live for many years,” says Curator Aurele Godin of the Shippagan Aquarium and Marine Centre. “And I’ve got many other coloured ones — blue ones, yellow ones, orange and blacks. Every year fishermen come up with them. They call me and I go pick them up.”

Instead of showing dark spots on a dark green base colour like normal lobsters, Autumn sports a vivid yellow colour on top while her underside is almost white. According to a specialist from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans who examined the video and photos of Autumn, genetic defects can cause the shell of a lobster to develop strange and unusual colours. The specialist also confirmed that Autumn is a female lobster and estimated her to be roughly 10 years of age.

Until Autumn is transported to the museum, she will be residing in a an underwater cage near Knockwood’s home.

The below story is unrelated to the first one but is still worth a look as it shows how big lobster can grow:

According to a new report from the World Bank, inefficiency, wastefulness and poor management of fishing fleets are causing immense economic losses world wide. The report The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, which was launched at the World Bank headquarters in New York and discussed at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in Barcelona, says it would be possible to save 50 billion USD a year through wide-ranging reforms.

According to the World Bank study, the two main reasons behind the massive losses are depleted fish stocks and fleet overcapacity. Depleted fish stocks make it more expensive to locate and catch fish, turning commercial fishing into a less efficient business. The fleet overcapacity adds to the problem through redundant investment and operating costs.

While calling for wide-ranging reforms – including a comprehensive restructuring of fishing methods, removal of subsidies, and a more responsible and impartial stewardship of the seas – the report also acknowledges that such an endeavour won’t be without political, social, and economic costs. The current ‘business as usual’ attitude would however be even more costly in the long run, since it would lead to a scenario where commercial fishing becomes a drain on society through extensive subsidies.

According to the report, the recent steep increase in fuel prices can not be blamed for the loss-making since the marine fishing industry has been in decline for a much longer period of time. Despite increased fishing efforts and increasingly high-tech fishing fleets, depleted fish populations have caused the global marine catch to stay at the same level for over a decade.

A group of Indian fishermen have threatened to commit suicide unless the authorities take necessary action to stop other fishermen from using prohibited purse seine and hair nets. The banned equipment can catch at least three tonnes of fish and sea food in a single trip; efficiently depriving lawful fishermen of fish.

According to the affected fishermen, roughly 300 boats continue to use prohibited fishing gear in the waters off Ramanathapuram. Since the present regulation against the practise has proven ineffective, the fishermen now demand confiscation of boats and nets from unlawful fishermen. Officials from the fisheries department have expressed powerlessness, since the unlawful fishermen enjoy political patronage.

Located in India’s south-eastern coastal region, close to Sri Lanka, Ramanathapuram is a city and a district in the Tamil Nadu state.

This week, Science published the study “Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?” by Costello[1], Gaine[2] and Lynham[3], which may be used as a road map for federal and regional fisheries managers interested in reversing years of declining fish stocks.

The study has already received a lot of praise from environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) who says that the study shows how the overfishing problem can be fixed by implementing catch shares. “We can turn a dire situation into an enormous opportunity to promote better food security, create jobs and revive ecosystems,” says David Festa, vice president and director of the oceans program at EDF.

Catch share programs is intended to replace complex fishing rules and hold fishermen directly accountable for meeting scientifically determined catch limits. In a catch share program, fishermen are granted a percentage share of the total allowable catch, individually or in cooperatives. They can also be given exclusive access to particular fishing zones, so called territorial use rights. As long as the fishermen do not harvest more than their assigned share, they will retain a comparatively high flexibility and decide for themselves when to carry out the fishing, e.g. depending on market fluctuations and weather conditions.

“The trend around the world has been to fish the oceans until the fish are gone,” says Festa. “The scientific data presented today shows we can turn this pattern on its head. Anyone who cares about saving fisheries and fishing jobs will find this study highly motivating.”

As the fishery improves, each fisherman will find that the value of his or her share grows. This means that fishermen will be financially motivated to meet conservational goals.

In January 2007, a catch share system for red snapper went into effect in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the 2007 commercial snapper season to be open 12 months a year for the first time since 1990. According to EDF, fishermen in the area now earn 25% more and wasteful bycatch has dropped by at least 70%.

The Salmon runs in British Columbia are known to fluctuate, with good years being followed by poorer ones. Since the mid-1990s, most years have however been bad and many explanations for this situation have been offered, from El Nino and too warm streams, to over-fishing and habitat destruction. It is of course tempting for the fishing industry to place the blame solely on natural phenomena like El Nino, but it is hard to turn a blind eye on the immense amounts of salmon caught from the rivers of British Columbia each year.

Take for instance Fraser River, the longest river in British Columbia with a total length of 1,375 km (870 mi) and a drainage area of roughly 220,000 km² (85,000 sq mi). This is a heavily exploited river and the lower reaches are especially affected by habitat destruction brought on by agricultural, industrial and urban developments. The last great salmon run in this river took place as far back as 1913, when an estimated 38 million sockeye salmons returned to spawn. Out of those 38 millions, no less than 32 millions were caught and utilized as food fish. Four years later, the run had been diminished to a mere 8 million sockeyes, but this didn’t stop the government from allowing 7.3 millions of them to be caught. In 2008, an estimated 1.6 million sockeye salmon returned to Fraser River, but despite the extremely low figure the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans allowed commercial, sport and native fishermen to continue their fishing activities. Since the early 1900s, about 40 to 70 per cent of any given run has normally been allowed to be taken in nets.