Hobart
Seminar Abstract
Tuesday* 25 November 2008, 11.30am (Tas time)
CSIRO Auditorium, Hobart
Tim Lynch
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research
Hobart
Recreational fishing, Marine Protected Areas and threatened species
Globally Australia has a high participation rate for recreational fishing and in many sheltered waters they are the dominant fishing sector. In coastal Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) due to their rates of use and potential negative impacts on some marine species, such as the threatened grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus), recreational fishers are a key stakeholder group to be considered during planning. Recreational fisheries examined at the Jervis Bay Marine Park were strongly associated with habitats, for instance squid jigging occurred over sea grass beds and anchored fishing over deeper reefs. For all fisheries, however, effort was heterogeneously distributed in a highly skewed and bimodal fashion within mapped habitats boundaries, with anglers being discriminating in their choice of fishing site at scales equal or less than 500m2. The most extreme example of this pattern of effort distribution was for trolling, were anglers tightly targeted their fishing effort for pelagic fish around a small number of oceanic points. Spatial patterns of fishing effort were highly stable between both months and years. Even when months with highly different effort allocations (summer vs. winter) from different years were compared, there was no difference in ranked use of areas. While catch per unit effort (CPUE) for recreational fishers is highly variable, fishers with known high CPUE (charter fishers) displayed similar spatial patterns of effort allocation to the fishery as a whole. Following zoning of the park, even though zones were placed to minimise impacts on the fishery, there was a large and disproportionate drop in fishing effort. However, an almost immediate response to fishing closure at one small “no-take” sanctuary zone was the re-establishment of a C. taurus aggregation. Due to the precision and stability of fishing effort distributions and the tendency for even wide ranging species to aggregate, location rather than percentage area may be the prime consideration when zoning MPAs either to minimise impacts on fishers or control anthropogenic fish mortality.
Tim Lynch hails from Australia’s island state of Tasmania. After receiving his BSc from the University of Tasmania he went on to completed honours in aquaculture and a PhD in marine ecology from James Cook University on the behavioural ecology of the olive sea snake. After working at the Inland Fisheries Service on the conservation of the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish he moved to NSW to become a founding member of the states Marine Parks Authority, where he managed research and monitoring programs for several parks. He has published numerous articles on a wide range of topics: from spatial models of recreational fisheries and sea eagle abundance to Baited Remote Underwater Video Station studies of pelagic fish. In 2004 he was the Australian Academy of Science visiting scholar to North American and worked with NOAA scientists on a ROV survey of endangered white abalone. After 10 years with the NSW MPA Tim joined CSIRO in early 2008 and is currently implementing a national system of long-term oceanographic and marine biology monitoring stations.
Seminar Recording
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Location:
CSIRO = Marine Laboratories Auditorium, Castray Esplanade, Hobart
For further information, or to schedule a seminar, contact:
To schedule a seminar, contact:
Clothilde Langlais, (Oceanographic seminars) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (03) 6232 5399
Natalie Kelly, (Biology/Modelling seminars) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research
0438 452 483
Jillian Enraght-Moony, (seminar administrator) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (03) 6232 5320
Communications Manager, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC (03) 6226 2265
Margaret Hazelwood, Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies (IASOS) University of Tasmania
(03) 6226 2971
Last updated
21/07/09
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