Gonedau - fishy musings from the Pacific Islands

PNA High Seas Purse-seine Fishing Closure Extension

2010-10-06T22:19:00.004+11:00

There has been some publicity [eg here and here] over the last few days about the enlarged area of the Pacific high seas that the Parties to the Nauru Agreement have declared closed to purse-seining, but nobody seems to have shown a map of it yet.

Below is a representation of the closed area. The green shading is the existing high seas pockets purse-seine fishing closure, and the yellow shows the extended area that was announced last week.

This closure comes into effect for purse-seine tuna fishing vessels that are licenced to fish in PNA waters by PNA countries. Any vessel that fishes in this closed high seas area will not be allowed to fish in PNA Exclusive Economic Zones.

Raw Fish 6: Italian (maybe) Carpaccio

2008-08-14T17:29:00.002+11:00

This dish, because it involves "painting the plate" with thinly sliced raw fish, is supposedly named after the eponymous Italian painter.

In the Pacific, the fish can be tuna (yellowfin or bigeye) but something a little lighter, like Spanish mackerel, is sometimes preferable. It depends how you feel. In more temperate climes, salmon is the fish of choice for Carpaccio. Its distinctive colour lends itself well to "painting the plate", although its distinctive flavour is a matter of individual taste. Me, I've found I've actively disliked the taste of many salmon recently, on my rare trips to Europe, but there was an occasional fish that tasted good. I put this down to the crankiness of ageing tastebuds, but I later realised that the salmon I didn't like tended to be aquacultured, rather than wild. I don't think farmed salmon get the same opportunities to exercise as wild salmon, and I'm sure that the taste of whatever they're fed on comes through. A problem that battery eggs used to suffer from when chickens were fed a high proportion of fishmeal. Fishy eggs (now there's a marketing idea)

If you are fortunate enough to have just returned from a fishing trip, or have a friend called Trevor the Tuna Scientist, then a truer Carpaccio is obtained using a mixture of fish to "paint the plate". It's also a good conversation piece to challenge your guests to identify each different fish. Sorts out the true aficionados from the mere dabblers.

Ingredients

(Very) fresh fish (tuna or salmon, or a mixture of various fishes). 1 kilogramme should feed at least 5 people or provide a starter for 10

Salt, pepper
Crushed or chopped garlic
Balsamic vinegar
Capers
Olive oil (extra virgin)
Green garnish (parsley and/or coriander and chopped chives)

The fish needs to be sliced very thinly, with a very sharp, thin, knife. It goes without saying, of course, that it is very fresh fish that you are using. There's nowt worse than spongy fish in a raw dish like this, and there aren't any domestic fridges that will freeze fish quickly enough to avoid the formation of those large, cell-disrupting ice crystals. Paradoxically, it actually helps to half-freeze steak if you want to slice it thinly, but it's death to the texture of fish flesh.

As you shave the fish, lay each slice on a plate, with minimal overlap, until the plate is more or less covered. If this is for a starter, don't make the plate too big. Carpaccio, despite the thinness of the fish, is deceptively filling.

Then it is just a matter of laying on some flavouring. A dash of extra virgin olive oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar should be sprinkled aboard. A grinding of salt and pepper and some finely chopped or crushed garlic should do it. An extra touch, although it requires a bit of effort, is to lightly fry some capers until they "bloom", but you can of course just put pickled capers on top. Some may also prefer a dash of soy sauce and the odd hint of chillie, or lime juice.

The next step is optional. You can either (preferably) serve carpaccio raw, or you can lay the plate briefly on the burner to partly cook the fish. If you favour the latter course, the plate should be removed from the heat as the fish starts to "turn". Remember that the plate will retain the heat and continue the cooking, and the character of the dish will be lost if the fish becomes too firm.

Finally, a sprinkling of green garnish. I favour finely sliced chives and green coriander (you can use the stems as well as the leaves), but parsley can be substituted for coriander.

Raw Fish 5: European Escabeche

2008-08-13T17:22:00.002+11:00

This is not strictly raw fish. It's first lightly fried. I include it here because it is citrus-marinated.

The English obtained this method of treating fish from the Spanish, via the West Indies. It can be used for keeping fish for a length of time, but is most commonly eaten immediately. Dishes almost identical to escabeche have found their way into many European cuisines. They are all based on fish that is first fried, and then marinated in vinegar and oil, with whatever pungent or aromatic additions are most favoured locally. In this recipe the vinegar is replaced by citrus juice...

Ingredients to serve 4

1kg fish fillets (mackerel will do nicely)
150-200ml lemon juice
150-200ml (preferably Seville, or bitter) orange juice
150-200ml olive oil (for marinade, plus extra oil for frying)
1 sliced mango or avocado
1 small chopped pepper (green or red)
1 small sliced onion (preferably one of the brightly coloured varieties)
1 sliced orange
Angostura bitters, to taste
Salt, pepper

Put a bit of salt and pepper on the fish before frying fillets in olive oil until browned. Heat all the other ingredients together, except for the bitters, by boiling for five minutes. Add the Angostura and pour over the fish. Refrigerate, and garnish before serving cold.

Raw Fish 4: Philippines Kilaw

2008-08-12T17:15:00.001+11:00

This is the Philippines version of marinated, raw, fish, adapted from Charmaine Solomon's remarkable Complete Asian Cookbook.

Ingredients

1kg firm white fish fillets, diced into bite-sized pieces
lemon juice, enough to cover fish
2 medium onions, very thinly sliced
1 each large red and green capsicum pepper, diced
6 spring onions, finely sliced
3-4 firm red tomatoes, peeled and diced
1 large lettuce
200ml coconut cream
1 clove garlic
1tsp finely grated fresh ginger
¼tsp ground turmeric
½tsp ground black pepper
finely chopped parsley or fresh coriander leaves

Add onions and 1 teaspoon salt to lemon juice and marinate fish at least 8 hours. Do not use metal utensils.

Prepare vegetables and chill. Mix garlic, ginger, pepper and turmeric with coconut cream and chill. Drain lemon juice from fish, add coconut dressing and toss together with vegetables. Serve on a dish lined with lettuce leaves, sprinkled with coriander or parsley.

Raw Fish 3: Cambodian koy pa

2008-08-11T17:09:00.000+11:00

This version of citrus-marinated raw fish is eaten in Cambodia and Laos. The fish sauce, or nuoc mam is an essential ingredient, but can be substituted with more commonly-imported fermented fish sauces from other South-east Asian countries.

Ingredients to serve 4-6

500g white fish fillet
½ cup lemon juice
6 tender raw green beans, thinly sliced
4 spring onions, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 fresh red chilli, seeded and sliced
1 tbs fish sauce
lettuce, mint and coriander leaves for serving

Remove all skin and bones from the fish and chop finely. Put it into a glass or earthenware bowl and pour lemon juice over. Mix and leave for 3 hours or overnight in the refrigerator, then combine with the other ingredients.

To serve, put some of the fish mixture in the the centre of a lettuce leaf, add a sprig of mint or a few leaves of coriander. Fold and eat.

Note: for those who own a microwave oven, microwaving a lemon for 30 seconds persuades it to yield a lot more juice.

Adapted from Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook.

Raw Fish 2: Ecuadorian Seviche

2008-08-10T17:06:00.001+11:00

Many Latin-American countries, especially Mexico and Peru, have very good seviches - fish and shellfish "cooked" in lime or lemon juice. It is generally acknowledged that the seviches of Ecuador, like the following recipe, are the best...

Ingredients to serve 4

1kg white fish fillets, cut into 1" pieces
300ml lime or lemon juice
200ml Seville (bitter) orange juice, or other orange juice
200ml salad oil
1 hot chilli, seeded and finely chopped
1 medium onion, finely sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
pinch salt, freshly-ground pepper

Place the fish in a bowl and pour on the lime or lemon juice. If there is not enough juice to cover the fish, add a little more. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 3-4 hours, turning the fish once or twice. At the end of the time the fish will be opaque. Drain the fish, discarding the juice. Combine the remaining ingredients (orange juice, oil, chilli, onion, garlic, salt and pepper) and toss the fish gently in the mixture.

Adapted from The World Atlas of Food: A gourmet's guide to the great regional dishes of the world, compiled by Jane Grigson and published by Mitchell Beazley in 1974.

Raw Fish 1: Fijian kokoda

2008-08-09T16:48:00.001+11:00

"Cooking" raw fish by marinading it in lemon juice is a technique used by people in many lands (see for example the Ecuadorian recipe in the next posting). Different Pacific Islands have different styles, but they all generally involve sharp citrus juice, coconut cream, and chunks of a white-fleshed fish.

The following recipe for Fijian Kokoda is adapted from A Fiji Table - a cook book of the Fiji Islands, compiled by Gaëtane Austin for the Holy Eucharist Church and published by Islands Business International in 1989. This is one of the best Pacific Island cook books I have seen - it contains many authentic local recipes as well as the usual expatriate favourites - and is well worth getting hold of.

Ingredients to serve 6-8

500g white fish fillets (walu - Scomberomorus commerson, mahimahi - Coryphaena hippurus, or even albacore or yellowfin tuna)

3 large limes (or lemons)

1 cup fresh coconut cream

1 large onion, minced or chopped fine

1 potent chilli (or teaspoon Tabasco)

2 medium tomatoes, diced

1 large capsicum (green pepper), diced

pinch salt

Cut fish into bite-sized pieces. Marinate overnight in juice of limes and salt. Add coconut cream, chopped onion and chilli just before serving. Decorate with tomato and capsicum. Serve in a large bowl, or as individual servings on a bed of lettuce in a coconut half-shell (bilo). Note: if you refrigerate the kokoda for too long after combining the ingredients, the coconut cream will solidify.

Different parts of the Pacific have different methods of preparation: some drain off the marinade before mixing the fish into the coconut cream, others marinate for a shorter time. French Polynesian fish salad, or poisson cru, can be marinaded as little as 10 minutes.

By the way, kokoda is pronounced "ko-konda", with the accent on the second "ko". The written form of Fijian is fairly new (the language was first written down in the missionary era of the 1800s) and as a consequence the spelling of Fijian is very regular. Most Polynesian languages consist of a sequence of vowel and consonant sounds and when Fijians (or so the story goes) first started trying to read their language as transcribed by missionaries, they automatically inserted a vowel if two consonants appeared together. Thus, if kokoda had been spelled "kokonda", it might have been pronounced "kokonanda" when it was read out. Whatever the story, the language compilers were able to take advantage of the fact that the "d" sound is always preceded by the "n" sound in Fijian, to simplify the spelling. Other unusual (to English eyes) pronunciations in Fijian include "g" (pronounced "ng" as in "singer"), "q" (pronounced "n-g" as in "finger"); "b" (pronounced "mb" as in "lumber"); and most unusual of all "c" (pronounced "th" as in "rather").

That's nothing compared to Kiribati though, where "ti" is pronounced "s". The word "Kiribati" itself, when spoken aloud, sounds almost like "Gilberts" - the former colonial name for this island group.

Fish Food

2008-08-08T16:07:00.004+11:00

I've decided to revive this blog.

I dropped it for a while because I was putting my energies into an email newsletter for Pacific Island fisheries departments instead. However, no reason why I shouldn't keep up the personal musings as well.

Just to get back into the swing of things I'll re-post some of the raw fish recipes that I put up on the SPC website a few years ago. I had to take these down when the website became heavily institutionalised, striving towards a common "look and feel" for every page.

In the early days, when we started it off, it depended on personal commitment and input, but my early pages were deemed too unprofessional to be kept on the corporate site. Some of them even contained humour - extremely unprofessional! So, even though it was garnering more hits that anything else, I took a lot of this non-corporate stuff off and put it on a personal site.

After a long lay-off I looked at this again recently and found that it wasn't getting any hits at all. Google had stopped cataloguing it (those of you with free (Yahoo) Geocities sites might want to check this out). But in searching for certain of my phrases I found that some other sites had copied my text, with the addition of one or two words. How dare they plagiarise what I had so carefully plagiarised myself from cookbooks and old papers!

Anyway, over the next few blogs I'll repost all these recipes.

The theme is RAW FISH. With the rise in popularity of sushi and sashimi, the phrase "raw fish" is no longer as worrying to western palates as once it was. But it may still be difficult to find out much about how to prepare it, particularly the many variations of citrus-marinated fish that grace tables in Pacific and Caribbean Island countries.

One final note:- when choosing fish to be presented raw, or "semi-cooked", it is usually safest to choose pelagic or midwater fish. It's not a hard and fast rule, but fish that live on the seafloor are more likely to harbour parasites than fish that spend most of their time nearer the surface.

SPC Species identification manual

2007-04-05T15:43:00.000+11:00

The Secretariat of the Pacific Community has just put a new manual on the website, on marine species identification for longline fishermen and observers.

There is some very nice artwork in here, and it cost us a fair amount to produce, so please give SPC credit if you "borrow" it. However, as long as you do not make money out of it, we are happy for this information to be used for educational and fisheries management purposes.

Apologies if it downloads slowly. New Caledonia-based servers have to squeeze their bits through a relatively small pipe.

Pacific Island Fisheries Management Capacity Database

2007-03-12T00:59:00.000+11:00

The idea I posted a few blogs ago, about the possibility of a regional fisheries development index, has matured a little since then. Particularly after attending the FAO Committee on Fisheries meeting (COFI) and seeing the high importance that is placed on this kind of national overview information at the global level, particularly for planning future work.

A "fisheries development index" is not really the right term, and has too many competitive connotations. On the other hand, there are several things which are already in the pipeline, and which can all be tied together under the heading of a regional "Fisheries Capacity Database".

One of these is the fact that SPC has already been requested by member governments (SPC Heads of Fisheries) to develop a "fisheries capacity database". It is possible that some people think that the word "capacity" is synonymous with "training" but I see this as being "fisheries ecosystem management" capacity, of which the level of personnel development is just a part;
We have also been tasked by member countries (SPC Committee of Representatives of Governments and Administrations) with producing an annual report for them on the status of the Pacific Ocean. This may seem a little grandiose, but we take heart from the fact that this is to be incrementally developed using the "best available information". In some sectors, such as tuna fisheries, this is good information, in others it is sketchy - but by putting it all together at least we will all have a better idea of where the gaps lie;
We have just signed an agreement with FAO to update the FAO "Country Fisheries Profiles"for Pacific Island FAO members, and the information required for this exercise will slot straight into the database;
Another is the need that keeps coming up through FAO and other international organisations, for better summary information on fisheries, not just on the status of stocks, but on what fisheries development projects have been historically implemented by donors, or by the countries themselves, on what sort of management systems (including traditional and community rights-based systems) are already in place, and even what vessels have been prosecuted or cited by that country for IUU fishing.

At the moment this information is not collected in a systematic way, except for certain topics, and where it is collected it is not necessarily compiled into a historical series.

We're not going to duplicate the FAO databases. This will be a compilation of information that will be used first and foremost to produce the reports that our member countries have requested from us, but we will make sure that this information is compatible with, and contributes towards, global databases.

We will also make sure that the confidentiality requirements of member countries, contributing organisations, and individuals are satisfied. We already have policies covering the use of coastal and oceanic fisheries information, although these may need to be refined as we start looking at new types of information. The main mechanism for linking local information to global databases will be aggregation and summarisation, so sensitive details are not transmitted.

However, this will not be a "database" in the conventional sense of the word. Although it will be electronically compiled using a standard and comparable set of fields, the information will be very miscellaneous, and some will be textual rather than numerical. I guess the word "knowledge-base" might cover it, but all of these terms have unwanted, and sometimes grandiose, connotations. The emphasis here will not be on system design, but first and foremost on compiling the actual information, in such a way that can be later analysed and re-used.

I guess the final point to make is that this will be primarily my responsibility, since I'm the only person at SPC who can link all of these areas without a change in duty statement. We don't have a big new project to do this, or extra resources, so it won't be hugely sophisticated or highly detailed in the first instance. As well as putting together as much existing information as possible from SPC historical sources, I also intend to harness the considerable potential of SPC staff who are travelling to island member countries on their regular assignments, and ask them to try and find out more on a standard set of topics, in each country they visit. It may take some of them out of their comfort zone, but I don't intend for it to detract in any way from their assigned tasks.

Fisheries blogging - is it sustainable?

2007-03-02T11:21:00.000+11:00

I've put up 16 items on this weblog over the past three months, of varying degrees of "heaviness". These have attracted the grand total of two comments. This wouldn't be an issue if there were plenty of pageviews, but the one page I installed a counter shows that there aren't many hits.

I know from experience that, even if people appreciate an information-source, getting feedback from the readership can be like getting blood out of a stone. I also know from experience that it takes a while for the readership of a blog to build up, assuming it is worth reading in the first place.

And that is my dilemma. At this stage I don't know if it is simply a matter of time before what I put out here reaches "critical mass", or whether it is simply uninteresting.

I'll continue a little while longer though, and see what happens. Next week, when I'll be at the FAO Committee on Fisheries meeting, should provide plenty of food for thought ...

10 commandments to save world fisheries

2007-02-20T15:48:00.000+11:00

I just saw a new item at http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0218-fisheries.html entitled
"10 commandments that could save world fisheries"

A team from the University of Oregon (as far as I can make out - please correct me if I'm wrong) were making a presentation on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. According to the news article, they have proposed 10 commandments for fisheries managers "to protect the world's marine fish populations while ensuring ongoing production of sea food in a sustainable manner".

These are:

"Keep a perspective that is holistic, precautionary and adaptive. We must consider whole systems, we must fish with more caution, and we must learn by testing new approaches. Instead of talking about ecosystem management, we refer to 'ecosystem-based' management, because it's misguided to think that we can totally understand or completely control entire marine ecosystems."
"Question every assumption, no matter how basic it is or what the conventional wisdom suggests." The group says that some traditional fishery goals -- like "maximum sustainable yield" -- are based on flawed concepts.
Maintain an 'old growth' structure in fish populations, since big, old, fat, female fish have been shown to be the best spawners, but are also susceptible to overfishing.
Characterize and maintain the natural spatial structure of fish stocks, so that management boundaries match natural boundaries in the sea.
Monitor and maintain seafloor habitats to make sure fish have food and shelter.
Maintain resilient ecosystems which are able to withstand occasional shocks.
Identify and maintain critical food-web connections, including predators and forage species.
Adapt to ecosystem changes through time, both short-term and on longer cycles of decades or centuries, including global climate change.
Account for evolutionary changes caused by fishing, which tends to remove large, older fish.
Include the actions of humans and their social and economic systems in all ecological equations.

The presenters wound up by saying that "nowhere in the world are all of these 'commandments' being followed perfectly."

Now, does anybody actually have any major argument against any of these "10 commandments"?

I don't think I do, although of course it is easier to follow some of them than others. And I suspect that some of them are probably more important, or critical, to the aim of "protecting the world's marine fish populations while ensuring ongoing production of sea food in a sustainable manner" than others.

I'd argue with some of details, like the insistence on using the phrase "ecosystem-based management" instead of "ecosystem management" because "it's misguided to think that we can totally understand or completely control entire marine ecosystems". I worry that this uses the same logic as the people who say that because we can't always do single species-based management successfully yet, so what hope of doing ecosystem-based management? It misses the point. It's not about absolute control - its about looking at the bigger picture.

More anon, perhaps, when I've digested these a bit more thoroughly, and checked out what some of the gurus have said on these subjects. Like all blogs, the main purpose of bringing this to your attention is to see what other people think, so I'd welcome any comments from you ...

Pacific Islands Fisheries Management Index

2007-02-16T10:11:00.000+11:00

I first put forward this idea ooh 19 years ago when I attended my first SPC meeting as a Pacific Island member country representative, but was told that there was no way that it would fly. It would cause too much internal friction - it would divide rather than unite the Pacific Islands.

Well things have moved on a bit since then, and for several years the region has completely accepted several "indicators-by-nation" including the Millennium Development Goal indicators, the UNDP Human Development Index, and the Environmental Vulnerability Index. SPC even has its own specialised national indicator-tracking unit called PRISM.

Estimated Australian ODA to the Pacific by country 2005-06
from www.ausaid.gov.au/budget05/budget_2005_2006.html

Now, I reckon the time is ripe for a regional fisheries-specific index which covers the SPC membership, and gives everyone a better idea of where they stand. The developing countries and small island states would also be able to get a bit of a global perspective on their fisheries management performance by seeing how they stack up in relation to our bigger members: Australia, France, New Zealand and USA.

The only questions are: what indicators to use, and how to actually get the information. It's not exactly lying around on the internet waiting to be "data-mined", and there's no money for huge new research projects.

Suggestions on the back of an envelope please, or as comments to this blog ...

P.S. Here's a very rough start we made a few years ago

from www.spc.int/coastfish/Reports/ICFMAP/UNDPHL.HTM

Fisheries livelihood diversification

2007-02-13T14:14:00.001+11:00

In my last blog posting I mentioned Bob Gillett's name in connection with the publication of an FAO/SPC-sponsored review of issues in spearfishery management in the Pacific Islands region.

Bob Gillett enquires whether this Tongan trochus is F1 or F2?
(photo linked from the SPC trochus information bulletin)

Young Bob is nothing if not productive, and he has also just put together the final draft of a short review of "alternative income generation" or "livelihood diversification", as a fishery management tool.

The spearfishery review mentioned in the last blog posting was the result of visiting a bunch of countries and interviewing a lot of people, all in the context of several decades of personal experience. This alternative livelihoods review however was the result of getting several people from different countries together in Noumea, locking them in a room, and trying to reach consensus opinions on the basis of their various experiences.

It is likely to take some time before the paper is published, so I want to release a preview here. It should provide some food for thought, particularly for those who are about to embark on fishery management or conservation actions and who may assume that there are simple, well-established ways of accommodating those who are affected by these decisions, short of a direct buy-out, or who hope that people can be reliably be "diverted" from particular fisheries, thus avoiding the need for expensive management interventions.

The abstract says:

The use of livelihood diversification has long been promoted for relieving fishing pressure on inshore marine resources of the Pacific Islands region. Four main types of alternative activities have been promoted to reduce fishing pressure: aquaculture, fish aggregation devices, deep reef slope fishing, and alternatives outside the fishing sector. In reviewing the situation over the last thirty years, it is difficult to identify cases where the use of livelihood diversification as an inshore management tool could be considered clearly successful. It is relatively easy to cite examples of livelihood diversification failure, but a potentially more productive exercise is to identify successes. Past experience in the use of livelihood diversification points to some important overall conclusions. Perhaps the most important lesson learned about livelihood diversification in the Pacific Islands is that its performance has not been to the level where it can be considered an effective resource management tool. In many cases, livelihood diversification could even be a distraction that deters communities from gaining an awareness of the need for, and benefits of, more effective forms of marine resource management.

The paper itself is currently entitled "Livelihood Diversification as a Marine Resource Management Tool in the Pacific Islands: Lessons Learned", and the authorship is Robert Gillett, Garry Preston, Warwick Nash, Hugh Govan , Tim Adams and Michelle Lam. The work itself was sponsored by WorldFish and SPC. Keep an eye open for it.

We hope that there will be several more papers on "lessons learned" about fisheries development and management in this series. We've done one or two things like this in the past (our 1993 article on "Pacific Island Lobster Fisheries: Bonanza or Bankruptcy?" was an archetype), and these have proven to be popular (the lobster paper was the most-hit item on the SPC website for several years - overtaken only when we introduced a recipes page), but they do pose a dilemma for us as an intergovernmental agency: - how far can we go in being critical of things happening in our member countries?

Obviously national fisheries planners can learn as much from from failures as they can from successes. But when hard information is scarce, and when the judgement of success or failure depends upon consensus opinion, the publication of that opinion might have an unwarranted effect on individual or national reputations.

However, I notice that there is very little hesitation to publish success stories, and in terms of lessons learned, "false positives" can be just as damaging to the broader development effort as "false negatives" might be to individual reputations.

As a result, we have hesitated to do much in this area, but history is valuable, and when you see decisions being made in favour of actions that you know have failed in the past, it probably does more harm than good to avoid talking about past mistakes.

Spearfishery management

2007-02-07T12:42:00.000+11:00

A news item from New Caledonia. You may have seen it already since it has hit the world press:

A fisherman survived a shark attack in New Caledonia, France, by poking the creature in the eye as it shook him “like a rag”, he told a newspaper yesterday. Jesse Jizdny, a 30-year-old policeman, said the tiger shark went for him three times last week while he was fishing with friends off the northwestern coast of the French South Pacific territory.

“I saw a big tiger (shark) coming with its jaws open. I saw all its teeth. He went for my torso and I thought, ‘that’s it, I’m done for’,” Jizdny told the Nouvelles Caledoniennes newspaper from his hospital bed. He hit the shark on its nose but it came back at him and caught his ankle. Then it charged a third time and grabbed a leg. “It was shaking me like a rag. I bent round on him and put my hands on its jaws. Suddenly I felt something soft. So I put my whole thumb in, it was its eye.” The shark let go and swam away, while Jizdny was airlifted to hospital in the capital Noumea where he underwent an operation on his injured leg.

So just be careful next time you go spearfishing. Tigers aren't too choosy about what (or who) they eat, especially when there are dead fish nearby.

Photo linked from ScottS at flickr - www.flickr.com/photos/scotts101/55399115/

Which reminds me, FAO has just published our joint review of Spearfishing in the Pacific Islands ("current status and management issues"). Bob Gillett did almost all the legwork and writing on this, and it makes a useful read for anyone who is interested in one of the biggest headaches facing fisheries managers in this region.

It is ironic that so much is being spent on trying to get Pacific Island governments aboard initiatives to control international deepsea trawling in the oceanic tropical Pacific Islands when there IS no significant deepsea trawling in the region, but trying to get resources together to do something about an existing national management headache like commercial spearfishing is like trying to get blood out of a stone. It took quite a while to persuade FAO to climb aboard this review, but climb aboard they did, and eventually paid 66% of the costs of visiting 5 Pacific Island countries to gather the background information, as well as the publication costs.

Trouble is, this is a fishery without an international aspect, and local fisheries don't attract a lot of attention from funding sources nowadays. You don't get to speak for your country at the United Nations, and there is no high-profile international law governing it. I'm just glad that FAO, especially through the FishCode programme, is keeping its eye on the real issues, and not just pursuing the high profile internationally-combative stuff like the rest of the pack.

Well, we've got a concise statement of the issues. Now to try and find support for workable on-the-water control systems. This will require not just fishing community awareness, but a certain level of central government legislation and enforcement, as well as the rewriting of many national development strategies that still refer to the "teeming bounty of the sea", and which promote economic livelihoods through reef-fishing without considering the likely ecological limitations.

And this is one fisheries management issue where marine protected areas, in the form of seasonal or permanent "spawning aggregation" protection, is likely to be one of the most useful components to any management strategy.

The final document itself is not yet online, but it should be so shortly, and you should eventually be able to find it via http://www.fao.org/figis/servlet/static?xml=fishcode_prog.xml&dom=org&xp_nav=5,1

A draft version is however available on the SPC 5th Heads of Fisheries Meeting website at http://www.spc.int/coastfish/Reports/HOF5/HOF5-spearfishing-web.pdf

oneFish

2007-02-06T15:57:00.000+11:00

Apologies for the long silence. I've been on leave, back home in Scotland, and when I'm on leave I try to avoid thinking about fish as much as possible. (A bit difficult when you live in an ex-fishing village near two of the biggest remaining fishing ports on the Scottish east coast, but it can be achieved by putting your fingers in your ears and singing very loudly). Trouble is, I don't know much about British fisheries. My entire fisheries career has been spent in the Pacific, and I left Scotland with a degree in botany of all things. However, having spent the last 20 years trying to encourage Pacific Island governments to bring fishing communities into the management process, it is always a shock to go back home and find that the European Union has been doing the exact opposite. Its only recently that even regional consultative systems have been set up.

It reminds me of the days when I was managing a UK government-funded project to help Pacific Island countries set up integrated coastal fishery management planning frameworks, and I asked our SPC UK representative to see if London would send us some UK examples, to see if they could be used as models for Pacific processes, given that many Pacific Island countries legal systems are ultimately British in origin. The word came back that, sorry, but the UK hadn't actually got any coastal fishery plans up and running yet. I can foresee a time, in the not too distant future, when the Pacific Islands will be providing development assistance to the UK :-) Unfortunately the UK has withdrawn from membership of SPC to concentrate on needier parts of the world. Apparently we're doing pretty well here by comparison, not only in fisheries.

But this blog is not about international one-upmanship. It's about oneFish.

I'm not going to describe oneFish to you because it describes itself well enough on the website (http://www.onefish.org/), just draw it to your attention, because oneFish is coming to a crossroads in its career. This multi-user web-portal aims to become THE global repository for, or reference to, all research relating to fisheries, and it is making a fair fist of the job, despite a few hiccups in the early stages. But a donor funding cycle has come to an end and FAO now has to decide if it can afford to provide basic financial support to continue it.

You might think of oneFish as being a bit like Wikipedia - it depends mainly on the people who use it for its content - as well as having some dedicated staff feeding it and weeding it. And like any wiki project (I've been involved in one or two) it requires a certain "critical mass" of contributions to become sustainable.

I reckon it's there now though, and personally I consider it has become an invaluable resource. It is patchy, like any user-supported knowledge-base - some users are more dedicated than others. But it is worth it even if only for the areas that it does cover well, like IIFET, and archives of various email discussion groups. And the other areas will fill out as its popularity increases. For fisheries organisations and projects that don't already have their own websites, oneFish provides a "virtual office" facility. For others, like SPC, there will be no point in duplicating existing websites by trying to port everything to oneFish, and we simply provide links to our own websites. But, if we needed to publicise our work a bit more widely we could register each document, event & project individually.

I have one or two complaints about the interface - it always takes me a while to figure out exactly where the area that I'm supposed to be responsible for is located. Is it under "virtual offices" or under "stakeholder organisations"? And the URLs for individual topics are not exactly intuitive. The SPC page, for example, is located at http://www.onefish.org/servlet/CDSServlet?status=ND0yODEyNyY2PWVuJjMzPWRvY3VtZW50cyYzNz1rb3M. And everything entered has to be approved by a topic editor before it appears, even within your own "virtual office". But then I have complaints about every unfamiliar interface.

So please take a look at the oneFish portal. It needs all the support it can get right now, and I reckon it is well worth supporting because it is useful resource - and getting more and more useful every day.

P.S. No pretty pictures today because I can't get blogger's graphics to work.

Locally Managed Marine Areas (LMMAs)

2006-12-19T07:52:00.000+11:00

I'm occasionally asked why we don't directly support communities in the management of fisheries.

Well we do strongly endorse the involvement of communities in the management of local fisheries, but we don't want to duplicate assistance in an area of comparative advantage for NGOs and other national or local organisations. The main strength of the regional SPC Coastal Fisheries Programme is working with our main stakeholders - government fisheries departments - and helping governments to get institutional and legal systems in place that make community, traditional and locally-managed marine areas possible, or more effective.

SPC works on the setting up of frameworks, the provision of scientific information, and inter-country networking. LMMAs work on helping people in actually activating management processes - and this is likely to require a different approach in every area. The ecosystem approach to fishery management - our new objective - is based on how you look at the goals or outcomes that society wants from the ecosystem, not just from the fishery.

And there are many different possible routes to achieving that ecosytem goal - probably as many different routes as there are islands in the Pacific.

Coups and fisheries

2006-12-06T15:39:00.000+11:00

I just got back from a videoconference with our Suva office. Over one-third of SPC's staff are based in Fiji, and with a military coup brewing there is a lot to worry about, and plans to make. I won't bring any of that up here since things are moving fast and I don't want anything I say to have implications for any of our staff or trainees in Fiji. But also because this is a fishy, not a political, blog.

I just wanted to make one quick point: Apart from the obvious human impacts of any governmental overthrow, there are often indirect effects on marine resources resulting from the fact that fisheries are the "resource of last resort" in times of hardship. After the first two military coups in Fiji, in 1987, some definite "signals" emerged from the fisheries statistics.

(beche-de-mer)

Interestingly, the spikes in production in 1988, the year after the coups, was not in the food fisheries or on local markets, but in export fisheries - the main village cash-earners. Rural people had food, but the downturn in the economy hurt their ability to cover the few extra essentials that needed cash, and the quickest way of raising cash in the outer islands was to sell some marine products to exporters.

SPC told to produce Pacific Islands Regional Ocean Report

2006-12-06T14:11:00.000+11:00

One of the things that came out of the SPC Governing Council meeting a couple of weeks ago was a directive from Pacific Community governments and administrations for us to start putting together an "annual report" on the state of the Pacific Ocean in the western tropical Pacific islands region.

What it actually said was this:

CRGA noted:

that although regional tuna fisheries are comparatively well-reported, there is no annual regional report on the status of all fisheries, or other aspects of ocean use in the Pacific Islands region, and that such a report, based on the best available statistical and scientific data, and a fair balance of available opinions in cases where data is not available, would be valuable to national and international decision-makers. CRGA directed SPC’s Marine Resources Division to coordinate the production of a regular annual report addressing the status of the Western Tropical Pacific Ocean and its resources and uses, with the first report produced in time for consideration by CRGA 37

Now there is not actually a lot of hard information about what is happening under the water in this neck of the woods. There are a lot of opinions floating around, and a lot of patchy bits and pieces of information. And now we have the task of trying to tie it all together.

This is a fairly large area of water, as you can see from the map above, but we'll start small - based on what we already have - and keep adding year by year. Some of the existing sources of information, as CRGA points out, are the tuna fisheries summaries (see http://www.spc.int/oceanfish/) but also the coastal fisheries information is starting to fill out (http://www.spc.int/coastfish/Sections/reef/PROCFish_Web/default.aspx) and other regional organisations have collated ocean data from other sectors (e.g. http://www.sopac.org).

By this time next year we could have something useful in hand.

More on MPAs with fisheries objectives

2006-12-01T16:01:00.000+11:00

In my posting last week on MPAs with fisheries objectives, I mentioned that we had been asked to provide some advice on the subject to Pacific Island fisheries departments. What I should also have mentioned was that we were specifically asked to try and cut through some of the confusing and complex issues being raised by both sides in what has become a very political debate, with targets being set, and "political will" being mobilised to achieve those targets, with more attention being paid to getting the message across than to considering what the message really means.

We were asked to simplify things for the benefit of fisheries managers. What do MPAs actually offer to fisheries managers?

When I read back what I wrote last week I realise that I didn't cut much confusion - possibly even added to it. I didn't state the basic question (above) clearly enough.

The bottom line, I think, is this:

There are many good justifications for setting up reserves and Marine Protected Areas, without needing to invoke fisheries management. However, "benefits for fisheries" are often quoted as additional justification.
If you are a fisheries manager, then examine these claims in isolation from the other claims for heritage benefits and biodiversity conservation. It is usually assumed that an MPA will have a beneficial effect on fisheries, but when you look at it closely it may not - except in the kinds of limited cases I outlined, such as protection for spawning areas for particular species (the trochus reserve on Saipan in the Northern Marianas Islands - see the map above - is likely to be an example), or if you can believe assumptions that larvae are widely distributed etc.
A no-take MPA may protect marine resources from fishing, but that is different from helping fisheries. As I suggested in my blog last week, an MPA might even promote fisheries collapse in surrounding areas, and will usually result in lower total food-fisheries production from the whole island.

It gets complicated when we consider the definition of the term "Marine Protected Area". Most people automatically assume that MPA means "Banned to fishing". But an MPA is usually defined as an area where human impact is restricted in some way, from light restrictions all the way through to complete no-go areas.

If you look at the definitions objectively you will find that most of the sea is already, technically, covered by MPAs which restrict use in one form or another through conventional and long-standing fisheries management measures - in different areas there may be gear restrictions, or limited entry licencing, or minimum size limits for fish in place. If your politicians have already declared to the international community that a certain percentage of the marine spaces in your island will become part of a "network of MPAs" then check what they mean by "MPA". You may already partly qualify.

For example, if the entire EEZ of a particular country is off-limits to whaling, it usually declares that the EEZ is a "whale sanctuary" and includes this in any discussion of MPA networks in relation to global targets. (Try googling the search terms ["South Pacific" "whale sanctuary" mpa] and see how many hits there are). But many entire Pacific Island EEZs are also off-limits to other fisheries, including driftnetting, and this does not get mentioned in any discussion of MPA networks because it came about through conventional fisheries management actions.

Anyway - if you are incensed by any of my comments, please read the previous blog on the subject. I am not anti-MPA. I'm just worried that the whole issue of "MPAs with fisheries management objectives" has not been thought through before possibly unsustainable claims are made for their benefits to fisheries.

I have no doubt about their benefits in other respects, and I strongly believe that there should be at least some places in the Pacific Islands region where mankind's foot is not allowed to fall too heavily. As long as the price is not entirely borne by rural communities. I reckon there IS a price, despite what is often claimed (try googling ["marine protected areas" "win-win"]) - "If you restrict fishing in this area today, you will reap better harvests in surrounding areas tomorrow". Perhaps. And perhaps not.

I welcome reasonable debate on this topic. That's the primary reason I put this up here, but I realise that this is a new blog, and judging by previous experience, it's likely to take a while before there is enough readership to sustain a discussion.

Horace

2006-11-28T17:03:00.000+11:00

The following is one posting in a blog written by Rob Wright, a Fiji Islander, called "Hook, Line and Sinker". Although this was published as a series of weekly articles in The Fiji Times between 1957 and 1969, it was very much a weblog in the modern sense of the word. It provided a personal viewpoint on an issue close to the heart of the writer (and most of his readers), and it provoked feedback, both in the Fiji Times Letters column, and on the waterfront.

Rob Wright's Fiji Times columns were published as a book in 1969. Hook, Line and Sinker was published by the Fiji Times press, but my dog-eared copy does not have a title page, and I don't know if it is still in print. I thought it was well worth giving you a taste of it though, and if you can get your hands on a library copy it makes fascinating reading.

I might even ask the Fiji Times if they will allow us permission to post it on the website, if it is not in print.

______________________________

Horace

Horace was a well-behaved youngster, even for a cod, and entertained no firm ideas about cutting adrift from the family fold until they all swam past the small channel. He was in the wake of his Mama, but swimming closer to the shoreline than his brothers and sisters. They were on their way to the Bay of Islands, near Suva, when they passed the outlet and he received the first tantalising taste of the stuff that came down the channel. It was ambrosia, to him. He opened and closed his mouth dozen times, allowing the flavour to sift slowly through his gills while he wallowed with delight. So taken was he with this new sensation that he had forgotten about the rest of the family. When he looked round, they had gone, and Horace was alone.

Following the channel through the turgid water, he swam slowly upstream savouring the water every now and again to make sure that he was getting nearer to the source. The flavour became stronger, and he now was picking up small pieces of food, beautiful stuff which he rolled round in his mouth before passing it on to his gullet. Finally he came to the source. It came from the river bank where the food was funnelled into the stream from a gutter. He lay at the bottom picking up the scraps as they filtered slowly down, then, surfeited and sleepy, he swam off in search of a hole and a doze.

As he swam, small schools of damu (red snapper) eyed him suspiciously, for this was their territory which they shared with the qitawa (tiger fish) and saqa (crevally). Nearer to the surface, small ogo (barracuda) eyed him with distaste. Witless big brute, they thought. On the sides of the muddy banks, kuka crabs gazed apprehensively at him as he poked his nose into anything which looked like a hole, and here and there a qari (mangrove crab) raised its claws defensively as he hove in sight. And so it was that Horace came to make his home in the river.

In the days that followed, Horance began to set a pattern of day-to-day living which, in the years to follow, rarely varied. Most of the time he spent beneath the bank where the food came into the stream. Occasionally it would gush in as watery red wine. On other occasions it would be thrown in as great chunks. He shared much of it with the damu, qitawa and ogo who, after his long residence, had come to tolerate him.

The only ones he couldn't get on with were the cheeky small sharks which came in from the sea, full of their own importance and bad manners, and snatched and grabbed at everything.

While they milled about lunging at one another, he would lie quietly on the bottom and get the food as it sank down to him, as he knew it would. But the sharks did not stay long. They were too temperamental to stay in the river. They had to get out into the ocean and get the mud out of their gills.

Once in a while, Horace would add to the now familiar menu. He would leave shreds of food stuck in his teeth, then sink to the bottom, open his mouth and lay still. It was quite effortless to remain like this - even for hours on end. Qari, with their keen sense of smell, would soon be attracted to the food, and they would poke round his teeth cleaning it all up. When they were through, he merely closed his mouth on them.

Once in a while Horace would get the itch. This he knew was caused by sea lice, so he'd swim out of the mouth of the river and beyond to the harbour and the nearest coral head. Here he'd find the blue-striped wrasse, a tiny fish barely three inches long, which was adept at picking the lice from his body.

In the many years Horace spent in the river, he came to know that there were other things besides fish in the world. He had the wits scared out of him on a number of occasions when long shapes would zoom overhead, creating a terrific din of staccato noises with long trails of white foam.

On other occasions he would see scintillating shapes following in the wake of these creatures, but having sampled one - a peculiar device which pricked him when he closed his lips on it, he decided it wasn't a good source of food. Then one day he saw a shape which had no noise at all. It glided silently on the surface of the water with such ease that he rose to have a clear look. In a flash, a searing pain ripped through his body and his back was twisted with the force of a tremendous blow. He dived frantically for the deeper part of the river, straining desperately to free. himself from the thing which stuck in his back. Only by rubbing it against the bank was he able to do this, and for days afterwards, he lay in his hole to recover his strength. Horace getting old, and the once sleek form of the cod was now bulging with fat.

One evening at dusk, Horace moved out to get his meal only to find the pesky young sharks back again, gorging on everything they could pick up. They annoyed him intensely, but he'd show them. When the next morsel came into the water he shot upwards to interpose his bulk between the food and the sharks, and smirked slightly as his mouth closed over the food. Simultaneously Horace knew he had erred. He felt a terrific weight on his jaw and knew he was being pulled to the surface. He mustered the muscles which had lain dormant for so long, and with a gigantic thrust, surged towards the bottom. For a time held his own, but relentlessly the pressure increased until, for the first and last lime in his life, Horaces' head appeared above water. It was the end.

Fred Dukuram and his two companions looked at the great bulk which lay on the concrete slab of the Suva abattoir on the bank of the Tamavua River.

"I bin know that fish for two year," he commented, "when I see him I no telling anyone. I know one day I must catch him. Two, three times I see him and nearly get him. My boss say ‘him no big fish-only shark’. But I know. On Friday when I look in the river I know he's there. I put a big piece of tripe on a big hook with a strong line and throw in the river and the cod take him."

Horace had put up a game fight but was unequal to three muscular men and their companions who joined in the tug-of-war. When his massive body was placed on a scale it tipped the beam at 396 pounds, gutted. His gut, which contained qari and other morsels, would have weighed at least 25 pounds so his fighting weight would have been about 420 pounds. His back bore evidence of a deep wound which had healed. What was his age? Who knows? Ten, twenty, thirty years? When groper of this type make themselves a home, they stay in it for years.

[This species of fish is known variously as the giant sea bass, jewfish, cod, groper and, in Fijian, kavu. Its scientific name is Promicrops lanceolatus. They have been known to attain a weight
of 1,000 lb and a length of twelve feet. Horace was over seven feet long.]

__________________________________

This 450 lb grouper was caught in Florida

Whale workshop at SPC Noumea today

2006-11-27T11:30:00.000+11:00

We're hosting a workshop on whales today, at our conference centre in Noumea, New Caledonia.

More specifically, a workshop co-organised by the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium and "Opération Cétacés - Nouvelle-Calédonie", to develop a protocol for the comparative photoidentification of humpback whales and a catalogue of individuals in the South Pacific, with the hope of arriving at a census of the population of humpbacks travelling within the region.

There was a beautiful video screened during the opening ceremony, which used local footage and which I hope I can get my hands upon later.

We (SPC) don't have a lot to do with baleen whales ourselves, in fact we don't have a lot to do with marine mammals in general nowadays. When our environment programme moved to Samoa in the early 90s they took all of the work-area on threatened and endangered marine species with them.

Our fisheries programmes still have a bit of an interest though, because interactions between tuna fishing boats and some of the smaller toothed whale species seem to be more common nowadays.

I don't mean the kind of interactions that used to happen in parts of the eastern Pacific tuna fishery where purse-seiners used to target porpoise schools because of their association with tuna. Porpoises are not good indicators of tuna schools in the western Pacific, and purse-seiners target tend to target floating objects here, like drifting logs, or man-made fish-aggregation devices, when they are not targeting free-swimming schools of tuna.

No - I'm talking about the kind of interaction that seems to be entirely in the marine mammals favour, where pods of pilot whales traverse long-lines, "cherry-picking" the fish off the hooks.

I've never heard of any whales being hooked up themselves while they are doing this - they seem to know exactly how far they can go, and they usually leave the head of the tuna on the hook, neatly sheared off behind the gill-covers. Sharks will also take fish off hooks of course, but sharks don't seem to be half so clever about it. Sharks often get hooked up themselves, or they leave a ragged, sniggled carcass on the line - very different from the clean table manners of toothed whales.

The other difference is that sharks don't operate as a group. They'll take fish here are there, but if a pod of pilot whales discovers a longline they will often strip the entire line of fish, and then move onto any nearby boats. The only remedy is to head for the hills, and I've heard of boats steaming for hours trying to shake off a pod of whales.

From the figures I've seen so far, whale predation does not appear to be a huge problem for tuna boats. It still appears to be less than shark predation overall. But where shark predation is diffused across the whole area, whales predation seems to be locally intense. And many fishermen reckon that shark predation is decreasing along with shark populations, but whale predation is increasing in intensity - they reckon that the whales learn this behaviour off each other.

Of course whales have always been partial to a bit of commensalism with their human colleagues.

And "interactions" with killer whales have long been a feature of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery.

I'd be very much interested to know how much whales DO learn this behaviour off each other - whether it is social learning - or individual learning based on instinctive feeding patterns.

Orange Roughy on the endangered list

2006-11-23T10:34:00.000+11:00

Just saw in a press release: "The Orange roughy fish species will be added to the threatened species list under Australian environment law, the Australian Minister for the Environment & Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell, has announced"

I guess Orange Roughy will also now be added to Cod to further justify the chorus of "fisheries management has failed!" or "fisheries science has failed!", whilst the likelihood that politically-expedient decisions were made (or rather politically-inexpedient decisions were not made) in the face of advice from fisheries scientists or management specialists is overlooked.

If this does happen, I will be claiming, bitchily: "Isn't it interesting how, when a fish stock collapses nowadays people say that 'fisheries management has failed', but when a species goes extinct people don't say 'conservation has failed' "

The reality is that both fisheries management and marine biodiversity conservation have thousands of ongoing successes every day with fisheries that are not collapsing and species that are not going extinct. And the failures that do happen are object lessons in how to do it better. From my perspective as a semi-outsider, fisheries management has gone through some dramatic and radical changes over the past decade. In fact I would suggest that "fisheries management" will cease to exist soon as a distinct discipline and will need to be called something like "aquatic socio-ecosystemic management" (or hopefully something a bit less geeky).

And fisheries science is evolving rapidly. Some of the less-fit ways of thinking are dying off and the discipline as a whole is under intense selection pressure as it moves from having to worry primarily about the status of stocks - with the ecosystem in a purely supporting role - to worrying about the status of of the ecosystem itself. And into thinking about human beings not as an alien irritant, or a potential source of data, but as a components of the ecosystem.

I emphasise that these are just a few knee-jerk reactions off the top of my head (no Chelsea goalkeeper jokes please) and I'd be very happy to be told exactly where I am mistaken.

MPAs for fisheries management

2006-11-22T19:07:00.000+11:00

MPAs with fisheries management objectives. Are they likely to work?

We've been asked to provide an opinion on this question by Pacific Island fisheries departments through the SPC Heads of Fisheries Meeting, for two years in a row now.

It's a question that I have automatically shied away from trying to answer because the whole issue of MPAs has become so political. It's one of these issues that polarises discussion - it's a question framed in black or white - you're either for MPAs or you are against them. If you say anything for them you are labelled as a "closed-minded conservationist" by certain sections of society, and if you say anything against them you are labelled as an "apologist for the fishing industry" by others.

But its a question that we have to say something about - its on the list of things that we have to tick off before the next SPC Heads of Fisheries Meeting or else I'll be looking for a new job. This blog is a useful opportunity to try and get some thoughts in order, and get a bit of feedback (if anyone is interested in saying anything).

And I'm going to upset both sides now by going down the middle.

I reckon that there are many things that MPAs are useful for, and there are other things that you will not achieve with an MPA - that some other management tool could do a whole lot better.

First of all, I've got no complaint against any MPA that is set up for the purpose of conserving an area for heritage purposes, or to keep an area in something like pristine condition, or to attract tourists, or for education, or suchlike goals.

My only complaint is about the advantages being claimed for fisheries out of MPAs.

I just can't see envisage many cases where you take an island, assess the fisheries production, set aside 30% of the fishing area to be banned to fishing, measure the fisheries production again, and find that the total production of the island has increased. Even after 10 years of protection.

As far as I can see, MPAs are only likely to be useful in fisheries management under certain conditions.

1. They are likely to be a useful management tool for species which have a "spatial bottleneck" in the lifecycle - when there is a place where they are exceptionally vulnerable to targeting, but equally amenable to protection. I reckon that area-protection is unequivocally useful for species which group occasionally into spawning aggregations (where do you think the word grouper came from :-) and for species that need to move between sea and river to spawn. However, this is nothing new to fisheries management, either traditional or modern. And you will probably need a different protected area for just about each species, since they don't all spawn at the same place.

2. Where there is gross overfishing - where the biomass has been fished well beyond the level that produces the optimum sustainable yield, and where a reduction in fishing effort will actually result in increased yield. Of course, this increased potential productivity will only be available to fishing if younger fish migrate readily out of the MPA and don't just stay there. And of course there are other fisheries management tools which are capable of reducing fishing effort in overfished fisheries (such as saying "no" to licence applications) and making the resultant sustainable increased production available for catching.

3. As a breeding refuge for "old mothers" who contribute disproportionately more to recruitment than the same weight of younger fish. Again, the resultant juveniles or larvae need to be capable of migrating out of the protected area in order to actually contribute to fisheries, and the old mothers need to stay inside the area. Maximum size limits might do the job better.

4. As a long-term but still temporary reserve for building up stocks for special occasions, such as a traditional funeral or wedding, or religious feast. Or as as a form of pulse-fishing, where fishing for certain species is only allowed during short "windows" of opportunity. This can be useful for non-food fisheries (such as mother of pearl shell) or as a rotating series of closed areas, for food or export fisheries. Such "temporary MPAs" are traditional in many areas of the Pacific, and can mitigate the angst that most people feel if they think their ownership rights are permanently subsumed by the State. But most authorities do not consider temporary MPAs to be MPAs at all. It is felt that to have any conservation benefit they must be permanent. This is a reasonable position, but remember here that we are not talking about MPAs for conservation benefit but for fisheries benefit.

Well, that's some of the possible advantages of MPAs in the management of certain fisheries. But I can also think of potential disadvantages.

1. MPAs are attractive to poaching, and unless they are well-respected or well-policed, years of accumulated benefit can be wiped out in just a few poaching episodes. Spending your enforcement resources on more readily-complied-with regulations across a whole island may be more effective in the long-term than concentrating them on absolutely protecting a proportion of your area.

2. If you kick the fishing community out of a particular area, they either need to find alternative livelihoods, or add to the fishing pressure on the surrounding area. And if you have a sustainable fishery in the surrounding area this additional pressure may be enough to collapse it. In short - setting up an MPA in an island where fisheries overall are at optimum sustainable levels may actually lead to fisheries collapse. You have to be sure that there is either gross overfishing occurring, that there is obvious "underfishing" occurring, or that alternative livelihoods are readily available. And that last one is a biggie. People usually go fishing because that is their chosen, preferred lifestyle, or because they are forced into getting their protein from the only source available to them. If alternative livelihoods were available, and preferable, they would probably be in them already. We are right now taking a look at the preceived outcomes of "alternative income generation" schemes for Pacific fisheries over the years, and there don't seem to be too many success stories. But that is another blog.

My worry is that coastal communities in the Pacific Islands are going to be told that MPAs are going to increase the amount of fish available to them as food. And I don't think this "available" increase is going to happen. People see the fish numbers increasing in reserve areas shortly after the declaration of protection, but nobody apparently looks at the production of the whole island. They just look at the increasing biomass within the reserve.

Again, I'm not disputing that biomass of fished species does normally increase in Pacific Island MPAs - just the assumption that this biomass will somehow lead to overall increased food production for the whole island. It will certainly produce greater stability in surrounding fisheries - but insurance is not free. It will certainly be beneficial as a potential tourist attraction - and this is possibly the most likely form of "alternative livelihood" to be considered - but tourism is not possible everywhere. It will certainly be beneficial in attracting organisations who have global objectives for conserving biological diversity and who may be willing to pay to see these goals achieved. But I worry that some of these organisations do NOT want to pay to see their goals achieved, and instead may try to claim that the coastal community will be compensated at some future date by increased food production, or that alternative livelihoods will be found and will be sustainable.

(Just think - how easy is would it be to change the economy of your own neighbourhood? If you work for an NGO or government, how easy would it be if someone said that your current livelihood was unsustainable, that you had to get out of it, but they had found a business opportunity for you. Just form a cooperative with your neighbours and apply for a loan ...)

It may possibly be beneficial for certain grossly-overfished and particularly vulnerable species - export species like sea-cucumber and some of the larger fishes taken by commercial spearfishing and for the live food-fish export trade. But here the most effective form of "MPA" is likely to be spawning aggregation site protection, and these are small, diverse, highly-targeted areas, usually seasonal, and this type of area protection does not fit the profile of the MPAs that are required for biodiversity protection or other purposes.

You might want to note that most Marine Protected Areas regulations only protect the area against fishing - they don't protect it against development-driven land-based impacts. In some coastal areas these impacts can be considerable. But this is a point that applies to all types of MPA - not just those with fisheries management goals.

One final point - and this is a claim that has been made at the very highest level - is that the declaration of substantial MPAs is going to be the simplest and most effective way of implementing the "ecosystem approach" to managing fisheries and marine ecosystems. I'm not going to go into a detailed set of reasons why this claim worries me - you can probably glean most of it from what I have said above.

I must stress again one last time - I am not against Marine Protected Areas. I personally feel that it is necessary to set aside areas as "wilderness" for all sorts of reasons. I also feel that MPAs are necessary to lend resilience to fishery and ecosystem management plans, as ecological "insurance". And MPAs are also useful where there is the possibility of developing alternative livelihoods from tourism, or in the case of areas blessed with high Pinctada margaritifera productivity - from black pearl farming etc. But all of these goals can only be achieved at a cost - the cost of reduced fishery production. I just don't like to see people told that there will be no cost - at least not without some proof that this will be so.

Pacific Islands Women in Fisheries Network

2006-11-22T16:40:00.000+11:00

The Bulletin for the SPC's Women in Fisheries (WIF) special interest group (SIG) has been in limbo since the last issue was published, in April 2005. Trouble is, Aliti Vunisea, who was our coordinator for the network, got promoted into another job at SPC and has had her work cut out doing full-time socio-economic surveys of reef-fishing around the Pacific Islands, with no time left over for WIFSIG.

And I've just had my backside kicked by the SPC's governing council last week for letting our focus on women in fisheries drift.

It's all very well me claiming that we have "mainstreamed" women-in-fisheries issues into our regular work-programme - that we're concentrating on providing equal access and opportunities to our training courses - and that we're getting better statistics on social aspects of fisheries than ever... It's obvious that only a visible focal point for women in fisheries is acceptable as an indicator of our attention.

Teaching fish-farming to women in Fiji
(image courtesy of Satya Nandlal - SPC Freshwater Aquaculture Officer)

As with all service industries our watchword is: "the customer is always right", and so we are doing our best to revitalise the network. We don't have the resources to appoint a full-time network coordinator - in any case our SIG networks don't operate that way and one of their strengths is that they draw on expertise outside SPC - but Dr Veikila Vuki has kindly agreed to pick up the baton for a period.

There's more about Veikila in the press release we put out a couple of days ago. This is just to introduce her to a possibly broader audience and to provide a more personal welcome. I've known Veikila for a long time. In fact I moved into the job that she vacated when she left the Fiji Fisheries Division to do her Masters degree in 1984. So it is good to be working with her again.

If anyone is interested in contributing any articles or snippets of news about women in fisheries in the Pacific Islands, or indeed information of broader significance, then please get in touch with Veikila direct (veikilav AT guam.uog.edu), or with the SPC's Fisheries Information Section (cfpinfo AT spc.int), who will pass it on.

Resolution for this week: Try to avoid appearing on the Center for Media and Democracy's Spin of the Day page.

Worldmapper for fisheries

2006-11-17T15:35:00.000+11:00

Stop me if you've heard about this before, but I just came across this great little web-page from the University of Sheffield that scales countries on the world map according to various statistics.

I'm an inveterate hoarder of statistics, and realised early on in my career that a picture is worth a thousand numbers - a graphical interface is good and a geographical interface is great. This goes one better than the average GIS and actually distorts the map itself, so you get an even more dramatic view of the importance of AIDS in different regions...

...or private health spending ...

... or whatever.

More interesting to me was the map of the world as scaled according to fish imports.

The USA is big on fish imports, Europe is big, and Japan is relatively huge. I showed this one to a meeting of Pacific Island government representatives this week while I was talking about some of the factors likely to impact the future of Pacific Island fisheries. Import demand, and consumer preference is very significant to fisheries in this region, and this map showed at a glance what a page of dry numbers would struggle to do.

The only problem now is the lack of detailed statistics on our region - the Pacific Islands - but I'm going to try plugging a few things into a local map next week (if you can call a map covering almost the entire Pacific Ocean "local").

I'll be giving full credit to the worldmapper team if I use any of this stuff in future presentations. And thanks to Kim Friedman for showing it to me in the first place.

Launching the blog

2006-11-10T13:50:00.000+11:00

"Gonedau" is a Fijian word describing, approximately, the clan within the Fijian village who hold the marine and fishing lore, or the fish-suppliers to the high chief. Another way of putting it is "masterfishermen" or "masterfishers" (your choice of words depends on where you come from, but that's another blog subject).

"Gonedau" is pronounced as though there is an "n" before the "g" and the "d" - something like "gone en dhow", with a nasal initial "g" and the accent on the last syllable.

Gonedau is also the name of an email discussion list about Pacific Island fisheries and other watery matters run by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), and it seemed a good idea to use it for the name of this weblog as well.

SPC publishes a lot of different newsletters, and we hold a lot of workshops and meetings. The trouble with newsletters is that you don't get much feedback - it's a one-way communication. And the trouble with meetings is they are expensive and you can't have them very often, although they are great for feedback.

So we're going to try a bit of blogging for a change. A weblog seems to be a good compromise between conveying information and getting feedback.

Trouble is, it depends on subscribers being used to using the web, and being connected to the internet. So in the beginning we don't expect many of our "main stakeholders" - Pacific Island fish and fisheries people - to be on the subscriber list at the start.

But we hope it will grow, and it may in itself become a reason for using the internet more often.

But now - a few words from our sponsor:

The whole point of a blog is that you can comment on it. We welcome comments (of most kinds :-)
This is not an official SPC publication. It is the personal view of the SPC's Director of Marine Resources, and those SPC staff who want to take part. Whatever is said on this blog does not necessarily reflect the official view of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community.
SPC is a regional intergovernmental organisation serving the developing countries and territories of the island Pacific. Our main clients are government departments, but we also work with the private sector, with NGOs, with communities, and with educators and researchers.