Forest & Bird echoes scientist’s fears about fish

Independent conservation organisation Forest & Bird applauds fisheries scientist John McKoy for speaking up about the guesswork used to manage New Zealand fisheries.

Forest & Bird Marine Conservation Advocate Kirstie Knowles says the Minister of Fisheries must be more cautious when setting catch levels because not enough is known about most fish species.

“For a long time Forest & Bird and other conservationists have been asking for more facts about our fish stocks so we can better manage our fish for the future,” Kirstie Knowles says.

NIWA chief fisheries scientist John McKoy said in an online forum this week that information used to set commercial catch limits needed to be improved.

Kirstie Knowles says that of the 628 fish stocks managed under the Quota Management System, only 117 (19 per cent) have enough information available to assess status. Of these, about one-third are overfished, depleted or collapsed. These include stocks of rock lobster, scallops, paua, bluenose, snapper and longfin eels and the infamous orange roughy.

“This means that for more than 80 per cent of our fish stocks, we have no idea about status and so setting catch levels is literally guesswork,” she says.

The Fisheries Ministry’s policy, called the harvest strategy standard, sets a very low bar for protection of the stocks. “Only when stocks are depleted to 20 per cent of their unfished or original levels does the ministry step in,” Kirstie Knowles says. “Stocks are even allowed to crash as low as 10 per cent of original levels before fishing is closed. Some orange roughy stocks are as low as 3 per cent of original population levels.”

Forest & Bird wants the Government to put more money into researching all species, rather than just those fish that are most commercially valuable. The industry should also be researching other less valuable species because many of them are killed as part of the unwanted catch, known as bycatch.

“If we don’t learn more about the fish in our seas and the complex food webs, we risk the collapse of other fisheries like orange roughy. That’s a scary prospect for our oceans, and John Mackoy’s comments should be a wake-up for the fishing industry,” Kirstie Knowles says.

ENDS

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