Despair at the SFF

Members post.

“Knowledge gap between science and catch information from fishing grounds must be closed, says SFF”

I continue to despair at Bertie Armstrong. Once again he is banging the drum that the real-time situation found by fishermen and the scientists do not agree, presumably making a case for increased quota. Ironically, he may be correct, but does not appear to appreciate, the possible reasons why this may be so.

Fishermen don’t go out and drop their nets at random. They go to fish-holding marks that have historically produced catches for many years. The scientists just don’t do that. They sample over wide regions of sea bed, some prolific and a lot that are less so, to give an overall picture of fish populations.

One scientist tried to explain this with the analogy of a shallow bowl representing the seabed, and a handful of marbles representing the fish. The centre of the bowl was the ideal habitat, the area fishermen targeted. The edges of the bowl were the less ideal areas for fish, where fishermen never went. When the fishermen came along, they took out of the centre of the bowl some marbles, a good catch. The centre marbles they took out were replaced immediately by some of the other marbles sliding down from the outside of the bowl. The fishermen came along another day and took out another few marbles from the centre. Another good catch. This happened for several trips. There were always plenty marbles in the bowl as long as you took them out of the centre, the ideal habitat. Then one day they came along, and there were no marbles, because there there were none left to fill up the centre from around the edges. The fishermen could not understand it. There’s lots of fish in the sea, they said. We see it.

Re-populating fish naturally inhabit ideal habitat first, migrating from the less ideal. If Mr Armstrong, and his members had their way, these fragile patches of regeneration, around seabed structures, would immediately be back under extreme pressure. When surveys show good stock regeneration in ALL areas surveyed, then it may be time to look at increased quotas, but only then. Mr Armstrong could meanwhile concentrate on the good conservation work some of his members have recently achieved. The faster they progress with it, the sooner they will reap the benefits accruing from it.

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