Historical fishery attributes and changing management expectations – a mismatch?
(Rod Lenanton is Supervising Finfish Scientist at the Western Australian Marine Research Laboratories, Department of Fisheries, PO Box 20, North Beach, WA, 6920. His email address is: rlenanton@fish.wa.gov.au)
Abstract
New ecologically sustainable development reporting requirements are forcing fishery managers to revise both the way in which fisheries are managed, and the directions of research and monitoring in relation to assessment of the status of the resource, the fishery and the supporting ecosystem. Nowhere will this change be more acutely felt than in the country’s oldest and economically poorest, but arguably culturally richest fisheries. In order to resolve this issue, and have a clearer understanding of where we need to go in the future, we need to understand where we have been in the past. Highlighted as an introduction to this session are some of the characteristics that illustrate the mismatch between past fishery attributes, and future management and reporting expectations.
Introduction
Over past years, while the wider community has received specific high-quality advice on the status of retained species targeted by most of Australia’s key fisheries, it has received at best, only broadly precautionary advice about the impacts of fishing on other components of the fish community and the ecosystem on which the fish depend. The community however, is no longer satisfied with this level of advice. Instead, it is demanding that the assessment of the impacts of fishing comply with Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) reporting requirements in their broadest sense, including benefits and costs, i. e. making explicit what for many years has been implicit. Nowhere will this change be more acutely felt that in the numerous inshore coastal, estuarine and freshwater wild harvest fisheries distributed along the entire Australian coastline. In the words of Gibbs (2000), as we focus on such fisheries, we are dealing with ‘a dynamic complex multi-species and multi-harvest system with limited information’. Thus while the larger, more profitable fisheries (mostly invertebrate) are able to generate the level of funding required to support the assessment and reporting process, the numerous less profitable fisheries do not. The latter are mainly finfish fisheries, and include commercial and recreational fisheries, customary fishing, and non-extractive activities such as diving, with the predominant focus on inshore coastal, estuarine, and freshwater environments. Given the likelihood that these funding inequities will worsen in the near future, there is an urgent need to think of more innovative ways of ‘doing more with less’.
The outcomes of this workshop may provide at least some solutions to this daunting problem. So that we can effectively move forward however, it is important that we first understand where we have been in the past.
Historical attributes and future needs
During the preceding session, the emerging issues and needs of fisheries management have been identified, together with the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture (SCFA) conceptual reporting and assessment framework developed to address these needs. Broadly speaking, this framework covers both ecological and human well being, and the means of achieving both. Management expectations delivered through the governance process as identified in the national ESD reporting framework will be in four main areas: captured species, environment, social well being and economic well being. Performance indicators need to be developed in each of these areas, and performance measures (against targets and limits) need to be determined in order to meet operational objectives that will deliver ecological sustainability. In the areas dealing with captured species and the environment (ecological well being), we currently have a relatively poor understanding of the collective impact of the multi-sector, multi-gear fisheries involving a suite of coastal and inland species with complex and dynamic life histories. Thus there is a ‘mismatch’ between our current understanding and the level of understanding needed to successfully complete the required ESD assessment and reporting. This situation has been formally acknowledged and is now being addressed in Western Australia, through the Integrated Fisheries Management (IFM) initiative (Government of Western Australia 2000), and an associated review into customary (subsistence) fishing.
- Particular characteristics of these older traditional coastal and inland fisheries have compromised the effective use of available fishery-dependent data in stock assessment and evaluation of fishery performance and, under the new and more demanding ESD reporting process, they will continue to do so. For commercial fisheries, these characteristics include:
- multi-species fisheries targeting a large range of finfish and/or invertebrate species;
- lifestyle/opportunism of fishers;
- variable market demand;
- significant fishery interrelationships, where effort expended often depends on performance of other fisheries;
- small sustainable catches of individual target species;
- relatively low value of the catch; and
- spatial heterogeneity of catches.
Stocks of many species are exploited by both commercial and recreational sectors, and within each sector often by a number of independently managed fisheries located both entirely within, or spanning several regions. (sea mullet, Mugil cephalus, and various shark species provide examples of stocks taken by a broad range of managed fisheries.)
Several other factors have compromised the use of data from commercial fisheries and two of them are cited here. Confidentiality provisions around the use of commercial catch and effort data collected during periods of low fisher participation have created additional problems over recent years: there is an urgent need to relax these provisions and thus maximise access to all available data. The commercial catches of non-target species have been poorly documented, and often the precise identification of these species has either been poor, or lacking altogether.
As a consequence of the shift from predominantly commercial to predominantly recreational fishing in recent years, fishers in some regions (e.g. Leschenault Estuary, Western Australia) are now exclusively recreational. Unlike commercial fishers, recreational, and to a large extent customary, fishers are primarily motivated by a desire to catch a feed and enjoy the experience, i.e. they are driven by lifestyle considerations. There are a large number of recreational and customary fishers and individually they take an extremely small proportion of the stock on any given outing. Historically, catch and effort statistics for recreational and customary fishing were either not, or only infrequently collected.
The life history characteristics of both fish and invertebrate species targeted by these fisheries has also contributed to the difficulties encountered using fishery-dependent data in the stock assessment process and include:
- complex life history of target species, with many species using rivers, estuaries and nearshore marine coastal embayments and other marine habitats either seasonally, or at different life history stages;
- variable recruitment, often environmentally driven; and
- schooling/aggregation behaviour of certain species.
Further, stock abundance is often a consequence of factors other than fishing, and thus the management of the impact of these factors is outside the control of the fisheries management agency. For example, the capacity of many of the nation’s estuaries and inland waters to support fish and invertebrate stocks has been severely compromised as a consequence of past catchment management practices.
Although beyond the scope of this workshop, future efficient governance is also likely to be complicated by past management arrangements. These management arrangements were often developed during the earlier history of older fisheries on an individual needs basis, with little understanding of the complex biology and ecology of the targeted fish communities, or the need to evaluate fishery performance including:
- the absence of management plans for some of these fisheries;
- ‘multifaceted management’, implemented through a complex set of license conditions, permitted gear, spatial/temporal closures, size and bag limits, allocated fishing time, and in some instances quota; and
- management objectives often poorly defined (when plans did exist) and often not linked to performance targets, because of the difficulty of developing measurable performance indicators in the absence of management strategies and specific management objectives.
Thus within the biological, socio-political and economic context, these older traditional coastal and inland fisheries are complex and not readily divisible into simple management components. From a governance point of view therefore, there is a real need to simplify management arrangements in many of them.
Despite these shortcomings, and often only with poor quality data, scientists and managers did have access to long time series of commercial catch and effort data to enable determination of the status of exploited target species, and access to a commercial catch from which to gather regular and representative biological samples. However the demise of many of these fisheries as the result of voluntary ‘buy-back’ of commercial access has rendered these catch and effort data sets far less useful for assessing the status of these stocks today. This means that there is now a far greater reliance on the recreational sector and/or independent surveys to provide the data that is needed to satisfy the reporting needs of ESD.
When considering the best use of these data, a key question is how far has the emphasis shifted from management of fisheries in which the primary objective is the maximising of sustainable yields of exploited target species to ecosystem management which may result in less that optimal yields from target species in order to meet ‘ecosystem’ objectives.
Case history - Leschenault Estuary
An interesting and very relevant example of the type of problem that the managers of coastal and inland fish and invertebrate resources are facing is provided by the situation in the Leschenault Estuary, a system situated to the north of Bunbury, Western Australia (Figure 1).
Figure 1:
Fishing was established in this system during the 19th century (Lenanton, 1984) and has persisted through the 20th century. However there was no formal facility for the collection of fishery data until the introduction of a statistical system in 1941. Annual catch and effort data collected from the commercial fishery has provided the basis for management advice for the last 60 years (Figure 2a, 2b)(Potter et. al. 2000). However from about the early 1980’s, commercial participation rates began to decline primarily in response to an intensifying level of conflict with the recreational fisheries sector. This decline continued during subsequent years, accelerating further following the initiation of the Government funded estuarine licence buy-back in 1986; and again after 1996 as a direct consequence of the further injection of funds into the Government funded estuarine license buy-back scheme (Fishery Adjustment Scheme). The decline in the commercial estuarine fishery culminated this year (2001) with the surrender of the remaining commercial licences. There is now no commercial fishery in this estuary, despite the available data indicating that the fishery was performing well up until its closure (Figure 2b). With it has gone the valuable historical catch and effort database, the ability to gather representative biological samples from the stocks of the main target species, and the collective knowledge of a group of fishers that had a daily presence on the waterway. The first and only recreational creel survey ever conducted in this estuarine system was undertaken in 1998 (Malseed, Sumner and Williamson 2000). During that year, the estimated recreational blue swimmer crab (Portunus pelagicus) catch was 48 tonnes, while the recreational finfish catch from the estuary basin was estimated to be less than one tonne. The principal species in the finfish catch were whiting (various sillaginids), tailor (Pomatomus saltatrix) and Australian herring (Arripis georgiana). The comparable commercial catch during that year was 88 tonnes, only three tonnes of which were crabs, and 70 tonnes of which consisted of sea mullet and yelloweye mullet (Aldrichetta fosteri), which are of little interest to recreational anglers. During the current financial year, under conditions of heightened recreational participation (which include the ongoing activities of recreational netters) there will for the first time in
more than 60 years be no data available from which to determine the status of the stocks, or measure the performance of this fishery.
Figure 2a. The annual catch (tonnes) of finfish and blue swimmer crabs, and the number of commercial vessels operating annually on the Leschenault Estuary commercial fishery, from the commencement of the catch and effort statistical system in 1941, until the closure of the fishery in 2001.
Figure 2b The annual finfish catch rate (tonnes/boat), and the number of commercial vessels operating annually on the Leschenault Estuary commercial fishery, from the commencement of the catch and effort statistical system in 1941, until the closure of the fishery in 2001.
Which way forward?
Similar scenarios have and will be played out in many locations around the Australian coast, with the balance shifting away from the commercial sector in favour of the non-extractive users, recreational and customary fishing sectors, and the conservation lobby (i.e. marine parks). However, despite the changing nature of our fisheries and the associated difficulties we are experiencing acquiring the data and developing new assessment methodologies, the Government still has a legal obligation under the new ESD arrangements to report on the status of the stocks being exploited in our coastal and inland environments. The following two speakers will provide a more detailed account of where we have been in the past before some of the likely solutions are discussed in the subsequent sessions of this workshop.
Acknowledgements
The assistance of Gabrielle Nowara is gratefully acknowledged. The Department of Fisheries kindly allowed me the opportunity to participate in this workshop.
References
Gibb, P. J. 2000. Environmental assessments. Issues in application to fisheries: a State perspective. Paper presented to ABARE’s Outlook 2000 Conference, Canberra.
Government of Western Australia. 2000. Protection and sharing Western Australia’s coastal fish resources. The path to integrated management. Issues and proposals for community discussion. Fisheries Management Paper No. 135. 90 pp.
Lenanton, R.C.J. 1984. The commercial fisheries of temperate Western Australian estuaries: early settlement to 1975. Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Western Australia, Report 62. 92 pp.
Malseed, B.E., Sumner, N. E. and Williamson, P.C. 2000. A 12 month survey of recreational fishing in the Leschenault Estuary of Western Australia. Fisheries Research Report, Fisheries Western Australia 120: 1–36.
Potter, I. C., Chalmer, P. N., Tiivel, D. J., Steckis, R. A. and Lenanton, R. C. J. 2000. The fish and fishery of the Leschenault estuary in south-western Australia. Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia 83(4): 259-280.
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