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.

Scientists are unaware of the state of nearly two-thirds of Europe’s fish stocks and do not have enough information to assess the exact scale of the crisis the European fishing industry is facing, says the European Commission.

This is naturally alarming, since the commission last month admitted that nothing short of a completely new fisheries management system based on scientific evidence could stop the downward spiral of years of dangerously depleted fish stocks and get the struggling European fishing industry back on its feet.

Europe

The European Commission is now proposing smaller annual EU fish catch quotas and have given governments and industry representatives until the end of July to submit their views.

“The contribution of EU fisheries to the European economy and food supply is far smaller today than it was in the past. Even more worryingly, the status of some 59 per cent of stocks is unknown to scientists, largely due to inaccurate catch reporting,” the European Commission says in an official statement.

The policy has not been reformed since 2002 and the European Commission admits there has been “slow progress” in stock recovery, since quotas consistently have been set at unsustainably high levels.

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.

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%.