A study proposing a ban on spear guns and gill nets in the Great Barrier Reef is now being criticised by Australian scientists saying its results – which were obtained from Kenya and Papua New Guinea – aren’t relevant to the Great Barrier Reef.

The study, carried out by an international team of scientists led by Dr Josh Cinner from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, proposed a ban on fishing gear such as spear guns, fish traps, beach seine nets, and gill nets to aid damaged reefs in their recovery. According to data obtained from the waters of Kenya and Papua New Guinea, certain types of fishing gear are more damaging to corals and to certain species of fish needed to help reefs recover from bleaching or storm damage.

“They [corals and certain types of reef fish] are already on the edge because of the overfishing and the additional impact caused by a bleaching even can push them over,” said Dr Cinner, who is based at James Cook University.

According to Dr Josh, spear guns are the most damaging of all fishing gear, particularly to fish that help maintaining the reef by removing seaweeds and sea urchins.

“Spear guns target a high proportion of species that help maintain the resilience of coral reefs, but also can result in a surprising amount of damage to the corals themselves,” Dr Cinner said. “When a fish is shot with a spear gun, it often hides in the reef, so some fishermen break the corals in their attempts to get it.”

Not applicable to the Great Barrier Reef, says other scientists Fellow JCU fisheries scientist Dr Andrew Tobin do not agree with the fishing gear ban recommendation, saying that the results from the study aren’t applicable to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“Some of those findings are probably very reasonable for those areas they’ve studied, but to make any link to Great Barrier Reef waters is probably drawing a very long sword,” Dr Tobin said.

According to Townsville marine biologist Dr Walter Starck, who provides advice to Sunfish North  Queensland, herbivore fish aren’t being overfished in the Great Barrier Reef area.

“Here in Australia, it is completely irrelevant,” he said.

Florida will soon have the strictest conservation law for the harvest of imperilled freshwater turtles in the U.S. The new legislation pertains to all freshwater turtles on Florida’s imperilled species list plus species that look similar to the imperilled species, which include common snapping turtles and cooters.

• Commercial harvesting of these freshwater turtles will be prohibited.
• Individuals will still be allowed to take these freshwater turtles for non-commercial use, but no more than one turtle per day per person.
• Transporting more than one of these turtles per day will be prohibited.
• Collecting freshwater turtle eggs will be prohibited.

Turtle farms that depend on turtles collected from the wild will still be allowed to collect turtles, but only if adhering to a strict set of rules and only in order to establish reproduction in captivity to make the farm self-sustaining.

“I believe this industry should be moved to aquaculture, said Rodney Barreto, chairman of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). “That’s the logical place for it to be.”

The closed season for the take of softshell turtles, May 1 to July 31, will not change under the new rule.

During recent years, massive jellyfish congregations have appeared along the Northeast U.S. coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Mediterranean, in the Black and Caspian Seas, and in South-East Asian coastal waters.

“Dense jellyfish aggregations can be a natural feature of healthy ocean ecosystems, says Dr Anthony Richardson of the University of Queensland, but a clear picture is now emerging of more severe and frequent jellyfish outbreaks worldwide.”

A new study by Richardson and his colleagues at the University of Miami, Swansea University and the University of the Western Cape, presents convincing evidence that these massive jellyfish populations are supported by the release of excess nutrients from fertilisers and sewage, and that fish populations depleted by over-fishing no longer are capable of keeping them in check.

“Fish normally keep jellyfish in check through competition and predation but overfishing can destroy that balance,” Dr Richardson says. “For example, off Namibia intense fishing has decimated sardine stocks and jellyfish have replaced them as the dominant species. Mounting evidence suggests that open-ocean ecosystems can flip from being dominated by fish, to being dominated by jellyfish. This would have lasting ecological, economic and social consequences.”

In addition to this, the distribution of many jellyfish species may extend as a response to global warming and an increased water temperature could also favour certain species by augmenting the availability of flagellates in surface waters.

The study, which was lead by CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship, has been published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

You can find more information about CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship here:

450 pound blobs filling up the Sea of Japan

The changing ecosystems affect a long row of different jellyfish species, but some of the most spectacular jellyfish congregations observed during recent years have involved the Nomura jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai) living in the Sea of Japan (Also known as the East Sea). This colossal species, which can reach a size of 2 metres* across and weigh up to 220 kg**, is also present in the Yellow Sea as well as in the rest of the East China Sea.

After becoming a major problem in the region, the Nomura jellyfish population is now combated by a special committee formed by the Japanese government. Killing jellyfish or ensnaring them in nets will however only prompt these animals to release billions of sperm or eggs; aggrevating the problem rather than reducing it. Coastal communities in Japan have started to harvest jellyfish and sell them as a dried and salted snack, and students in Obama, Fukui have started making jellyfish cookies and jellyfish-based tofu.

* circa 6 feet 7 inches

** circa 450 pounds

The work towards replenishing depleted stocks of wild sea cucumber with captive hatched ones is moving forward at a steady pace; two Philippine hatcheries has now successfully managed to hatch sea cucumbers outside their natural habitat and one batch, comprised of roughly 2,000 juveniles, has been released inside sea pens in the Philippines.

The sea cucumbers, a broad range of species belonging to the family Stichopodidae, are currently facing both overharvesting and habitat destruction in the wild, and the two Philipine hatcheries are both part of a research project carried out by the University of the Philippines Mindanao (UPM); a project aiming to mitigate the problem of overharvesting through sea

farming.

The first hatchery is a 6,000-square-meter laboratory located within a Barangay Binugay resort owned by the JV Ayala Group of Companies, while other one is situated inside Alson’s, an intensive tilapia operator.

The Barangay Binugay laboratory does not have any breeding stock; instead it collects the eggs from wild sea cucumbers, place them in a tank and fertilize them using drops of sperm – a method inspired by a Vietnamese sandfish sea cucumber hatchery and grow-out facility in tilapia .

The first Philippine batch of tiny cucumbers, each weighing no more than three grams, has now been released inside sea pens near the Barangay Binugay laboratory. Carefully, each individual cucumber was buried just below the surface of the soft sea bottom inside 78-square-meter Australian-designed sea pens.

With a history dating back to at least the Sultanate days in Mindanao, sea cucumber trading is a time honoured tradition as well as an important source of income for the Philippines. The country is currently the second largest exporter of beche-de-mer (dried sea cucumber) in the world, second only to neighbouring Indonesia, and diminishing cucumber populations are threatening the livelihood of countless families.

Beche-de-mer is currently priced at roughly 4,500 Philippine pesos per kilogram (roughly 94 USD/kg), and since large specimens are becoming increasingly rare purchasers are no longer very discerning when it comes to size. Even small cucumbers that should have been left to mature can now be sold to unscrupulous purchasers.

Did you know…..?

… that sea cucumbers are known as the earth-worms of the sea since they recycle detritus and burrow under the sand? These animals carry out an essential ecological task as they continuously shift and mix the sea bead and if they were to disappear it would have serious consequences.

… that at depths below 8.8 km (5.5 miles), sea cucumbers comprise 90% of the total mass of the macro fauna?

… that sea cucumbers aren’t appreciated as food only; some people believe them to be effective against arthritis and high blood pressure?

…that sea cucumbers have been observed engaging in mass-spawnings triggered by the moon? One species is for instance known to spawn three nights after the full moon, while two other species have been seen spawning three nights after the first quarter moon.

… that sea cucumbers have been traditionally used as an aphrodisiac and that some people still use them for this purpose today?

…that large sea cucumbers often are harvested by so called hookah diving, where divers breathe through long tubes connected to an oxygen compressor aboard a boat instead of using normal scuba tanks.

Indonesia is getting ready to sink foreign boats carrying out illegal fishing in Indonesian waters.

“We are glad the House`s Commission IV supports us in this,” Marine Resources and Fisheries Minister Freddy Numbery said at a meeting with the House commission this week.

Numbery says firm action is needed to deter foreign boats from continuing to poach, and that his office and the parliament were currently revising the law on marine resources with regard to dealing with crimes in the seas.

Elviana, a member of Commission IV, agreed with the minister and said that firm actions needed to be implemented immediately to deter foreign parties intending to steal fish from Indonesian waters.

“Tuna fish sells well so that many foreign fishermen are venturing into the country’s waters“, she said. “This must not be allowed to continue.”

Earlier, Indonesian authorities have seized illegal fishing boats and auctioned them out, but this system seems to have been ineffective.

“It is believed auctions have been arranged to ensure that the boats can be sold to their owners who are also the suspects,” Elviana said, adding that illegal boats such as from Thailand still continued operating in a great number.

The European River Otter (Lutra lutra) which was once almost eradicated from British waters is beginning to make a come-back thanks to improved environmental care and the reintroduction of captive-bred specimens.

Now, anglers and fishing clubs are calling for more research, governmentally funded fences, and – in some cases – even the right to cull otters. Some fishing clubs have already closed down after having their stocks devoured by otters, while others have been forced to lower their fees since they have less fish to offer than before. Clubs are also spending thousands of pounds on restocking their ponds.

Until the 1970s, otters were hunted in the kingdom using special otter hounds, and the population also suffered greatly from the consequences of habitat destruction and pollution. The use of pesticides proved especially fatal and in the 1970s the population was almost completely gone. Thanks to pollution control, habitat restoration, and a ban on otter hunting, the UK has however once again became a favourable country for this aquatic predator and the reintroduction of captive-bred have proven highly successful. Otters are now living even in urban rivers.

Dr Tony Mitchell-Jones, a mammal specialist from Natural England, said that otters had been released into the wild at the rate of more than seven a year between 1983 and 1999, but that no captive-bred otters had been released since then.

When the last large-scale survey was carried out in 2003, the European river otter was found in more than five times as many areas as in 1979.

On June 9, a meeting will take place in Hemel Hempstead were representatives of the Angling Trust, the Environment Agency, Natural England, and the Countryside Council for Wales will discuss the issue of otters competing with anglers for fish. The Angling Trust has announced that they will exact government support for special otter fences in an effort to quieten calls for a cull.

Mark Lloyd, the chief executive, said: “What we need is public funding for fencing because fisheries are important economic units that provide people with their livelihoods. What has to be stressed is that anglers are not anti-otter. If I see one when I’m fishing on a river it makes my day.”

Nick Pottle, secretary of the Lakeside angling club, near Lowestoft, said: “Our lake is now all but empty of fish, we have two families of otters that have cleared the fish out. The Environment Agency say we must put up a fence to stop the otters at our expense as we would not qualify for a grant. That is the end of our club.”

The Angling Times, a journal for sport fishers, are calling for more research into otter predation. Richard Lee, its editor, said: “The slaughter of these animals has been driven underground. It is already going on. If you watch £20,000 worth of stock disappear in just a few days – what are the owners going to do? We are desperate for research so the issue is fully understood. We don’t want random culling. But we want to stop fisheries’ owners taking the law into their own hands. We need some proper research with all the options on the table.”

One of the reasons behind the belligerent situation may be another man-made environmental problem: the disappearance of the eels. During recent years, the number of eels has fallen dramatically in British waters. Eels are the otter’s staple diet and as long as there are plenty of eels the risk of otters attacking trout, salmon, pike, and similar species is low. However, as the eel population wanes the otters are forced to look elsewhere for food – causing confrontations between them and fishermen who do not like to see vast amounts of highly prized fish species ending up in the belly of an otter.

Many anglers refuse to publicly discuss otter hunting, fearing that public opinion will turn against them if they openly call for culling. On of few anglers openly arguing in favour of culling is Ian Chillcott, one of the country’s leading coarse anglers and a fishing writer. “Fisheries are being absolutely destroyed by these cuddly, little murdering blighters”, Chillcott said. “Livelihoods are being ruined but everyone is afraid to use the word ‘culling’. No one wants widespread mass slaughter, but there is a need for very targeted culling. It has to be done in a controlled way and not indiscriminate. No one wants to get rid of them, just for them to be better managed.”

Mitchell-Jones does not think that licensed killing of otters will take place anytime soon.

“Things are looking much better for the otter but it is not yet back everywhere it should be. Control of otter populations is likely to be discussed at the meeting tomorrow. I’m not going to prejudge the situation but there is a presumption against the licensing of killing of protected species unless there are extremely good reasons for doing so. For culling, you would have to show that the control would contribute to the solution of a problem.”

In the mean time, there are indications of some landowners and fishermen taking the law into their own hands. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act it is an offence to kill an otter, punishable by a £5,000 fine or six months in prison. Otters can only be hunted with a special licence and not a single one of these licenses has been issued. Despite this, some anglers have told reporters of otter hunting taking place in the British countryside.

Scientists tagging sharks off the Irish coast have tagged a surprisingly high number of Basking sharks this year: 50 specimens in just three days.

“I would normally expect to be lucky if we tagged 50 in a whole year,” said Dr Simon Berrow of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.

Basking SharkA record

Together with National Parks and Wildlife Service conservation ranger Emmett Johnston, Dr Berrow set out earlier this week to tag sharks off Donegal, as part of a project funded by the Heritage Council.

“In two hours last Monday we tagged 23 sharks, and we found 19 the following day – four of which had been tagged the day before,” Dr Berrow said. By the third day, they had tagged their 50^th basking shark.

Basking sharks were once a significant source of income for Irish whalers and the coastal towns of Galway and Waterford did for instance have street lights lit with basking shark oil as early as the 18^th century.

The importance of Basking sharks in Irish culture is evident in the number of names and monikers give to these peculiar creatures. In Irish, this “monster with sails” is known under the names Liabhán chor gréine (Great fish of the sun), Liop an dá (unwieldy beast with two finns) and Liabhán mór (great leviathan) – just to mention a few. The epithets “Fish of the sun” and “Sunfish” both pertains to its fondness of swimming just under the surface.

In the mid-1970s the Irish stopped their whaling, but the problems weren’t over for these sharks since they frequently ended up as by-catch in drift nets; a fishing method now outlawed in Irish waters. In addition to this, Norwegian whalers continued to hunt for shark off the Irish coast until 1986.

The Basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and is a protected species in Great Britain but not in Ireland. However, the European Union has just placed a moratorium on fishing for Basking sharks in these waters.

If you spot a Basking shark in Irish waters, the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group would very much like to know any details about the sighting. You can find more information at www.baskingshark.ie.

Want to know more about Basking sharks and where they head when the Northern Seas become too cold for comfort? Check out our earlier blog post on Sharks of the Caribbean.

Dubai‘s largest reef, consisting of over 1,100 coral-encrusted rocks, has been moved to a new location to protect it from future development. Details of the relocation have been kept secret for more than a year to ensure its success, and the transfer was therefore not announced until today, on World Environment Day.

not the reef in the article!

Oddly enough, no one seems to have known about the existence of the reef until Dubai real estate development company Nakheel conducted an environmental assessment of Dubai Dry Docks’ breakwater.

“What we found [in the initial assessment] was the biggest coral reef in Dubai and an area of extreme importance, said marine biologist John Burt, Assistant Professor at Zayed University, who was brought on board as an independent expert. “Because of the conditions in the Gulf – where the water temperature can reach 35C and drop to 15C – coral has difficulty establishing itself. However, it has learned to adapt and we believed it was important to do everything we could to protect this reef.”

Moving 1,129 rocks

Traditional methods of moving corals were quickly dismissed, since they typically result in the death of up to 30 percent of the corals. Instead, Nakheel and their team of engineers and scientists decided to remove, lift and transport the corals by barge without ever taking them out of the water.

“Traditionally, when coral is moved it is chiselled or drilled from rocks, placed in baskets and shipped to a new location,” said Brendan Jack, Head of Sustainability and Environment for Nakheel Northern Projects. “That wasn’t open to us because each of the rocks was encased in coral, so we went back to the drawing board to find an engineering solution. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before and we are very pleased with the outcome.”

The project took five weeks to complete and involved engineers and divers drilling an iron bolt into each and every one of the rocks and attaching it to a sling. After being hoisted from its resting place, each rock had its sling fastened to one of several mountings welded to the deck of a 90-metre barge. Thanks to this new method, the coral rocks could be moved to their new home at The World’s breakwater without ever leaving the water.

With no more than 20 rocks being transported to The World at a time; it took 50 days to move the 1,129 rocks – each of them weighing about five tonnes. Sadly enough, some rocks had to be left behind since they could not be reached by the marine crane.

“We could not take all of the coral,” said Burt. “In some places the water was too shallow for the crane so the rocks had to be left. I believe once development around the Dry Docks breakwater begins the remaining coral has no chance of survival.”

The result

Initial studies of the relocated coral have been very promising and so far the project seems to have been successful. As mentioned above, up to 30 percent of the coral usually give up the ghost when traditional relocation methods are used but in the case of the Dubai reef only 7 percent of the corals have died. Independent scientific study of the coral is continuing and a scientific peer-reviewed research paper will be published once the study is complete in the coming months.

The future

The World, where the coral reef is now residing, is a man made archipelago of 300 islands constructed in the shape of a world map and located 4 km off the coast of Dubai. The total area now covered by coral at The World is 6,560 square metres and this number may increase as corals begin to colonize nearby surfaces.

“A number of the dominant corals, now at The World, are ‘broadcast spawners’ and their reproductive activities could result in the development of coral on nearby rocks”, said a Nakheel spokesman.

The exact location of the relocated reef is still being kept secrete to avoid attracting commercial and recreational fishermen. However, once the new coral colony is firmly established it may be opened up for scuba diving and similar activities.

In an effort to curb the population of invasive Atlantic sea lampreys (Petromyzon marinus) in the North American Great Lakes, researchers are now testing a “love trap” in northern Michigan.

The traps will be scented with an odour produced by male lampreys during mating and researchers hope that this smelly love potion will lure female lampreys into the traps.

“We are trying to fool them into a fatal love,” said researcher Nick Johnson who will spend the next three years evaluating the effectiveness of the method.

The traps will be placed in ten streams around the Great Lakes, since lampreys swim into streams when it’s time to mate. After spawning, they die.

The Atlantic sea lamprey is native to the Atlantic Ocean but has been able to migrate into the Great Lakes through man-made shipping canals. The first specimens where seen in the region as early as the 1830s. By the 1950s, lampreys had decimated native populations of lake trout and white fish by rasping through their skin and sucking out their blood and bodily fluids. Several other populations of large and commercially important food fish had also been severely damaged by the new resident.

Since 1955, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have worked closely on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to control the Atlantic sea lampreys, using lampricides (substances toxic to lamprey larvae), migration barriers, and sterilization of male lampreys. Hopefully, the new pheromone scented traps will prove an efficient addition to their arsenal.

Criminal gangs are becoming a growing problem in Adelaide, Australia, but unlike most other gangs, these criminals are not fighting over drugs, precious stones or illegal firearms – they’re in it for the fish.

Despite this, the war on gangs launched by Adelaide authorities includes all the usual features; moonlight raids, fencing criminals, confiscation of secret stashes, and officials being seriously assaulted by criminals trying to evade the long arm of the law.

Thanks to a growing black market in restricted fish and shellfish, poachers can earn thousands of dollar per week along the windswept beaches and mangrove forests of South Australia. The 100 km piece of coastline running from Garden Island in the Port River Estuary to Bald Hills Beach, just south of Port Wakefield, seems to be especially popular among pilferers, with 108 reports of illegal fishing this year.

“This coastline is a reasonably inaccessible area, there are few roads and lots of thick mangrove scrub”, says PIRSA* Fisheries director Will Zacharin.

Often working in gangs of three, poachers build fishing platforms inside the thick mangrove forest and stash their nets and other equipment there.

Special joint operations are now carried out by police and PIRSA Fisheries to crack down on gangs taking undersized fish and selling fish of commercial quantities without a license. Fisheries are also working with interstate counterparts to investigate gangs trafficking abalone, crayfish and Murray cod. Sometimes, officers find more than just frutti di mare – one current prosecution for crayfish trafficking does for instance include the sale of and distribution of drugs.s

The officers, who work in pairs, are armed with capsicum spray for personal protection, but this isn’t always enough when facing poachers in possession of illegal firearms.

“There are incidents where we have seized illegally caught seafood and the offenders have also been in possession of illegal firearms, cash and drugs,” says Mr Zacharin. “They [the officers] are regularly threatened, sometimes verbally and some physically, and we have had incidents where officers have been manhandled which we report to police and resulted in
people charged with assault.”

According to Wildcatch Fisheries SA, the state’s commercial fishing body, black-market trade in fish and other marine creatures is a growing problem in the region.

”There’s a view among the industry that poaching is a growing issue – it’s definitely something over the last couple of years which is becoming more apparent,” says General manager Neil MacDonald.

In the Adelaide region, 11 poachers have been fined $315 each this year and 10 illegal nets have been confiscated, each being about 1 km long. Statewide, poaching investigations have resulted in 135 cautions and 57 fines.

* The Department of Primary Industries and Resources SA