How Many Fish are we Catching in Qld?
That is the eternal $64,000 question. If we confidently knew the answer, we just might be more successful in lobbying to get the poor things better managed.
Recreational fishers who have fished Queensland waters for decades, are as one when it comes to the belief that our fish stocks are in serious decline. We know what it used to be like and how bad things are now compared to even 30 years go. But it is almost impossible to prove what we all know, because we just don't have reliable catch figures, historical or current, let alone any sort of credible stock assessments of what's actually out there now.
Commercial catch figures from log book returns were not publicly available after 2006, but have only just recently (2014) become available again through the DAF website. But before you rush off to the site, be warned that it is not a user friendly site and you'll need to be a bit of a computer whiz to get any sort of meaningful commercial catch figures from the data. Nevertheless, they are at least back online and some among us are slowly learning how to find stuff and make sense of it.
Recreational sector catches are even more problematic and unreliable. Every now and again some agency undertakes a snapshot survey of recreational catches, extrapolates the results using very dodgy maths and publishes some rubbery guesstimates of total catch.
Most of the best work on catch monitoring, stock assessments and predictive stock modelling is being done outside the government agencies charged with managing our fisheries. Sadly because of an "only scientists know the answers" mentality within our fisheries agencies, driven largely by professional jealously in our opinion, most of this good work is being ignored and even discredited by officialdom.
Unfortunately, fish are not like a field full of trees. If the trees are there one day, then cut down overnight, it's pretty obvious to everyone what has happened, but a school of fish that are there one day, then in someone's freezer and gone overnight, are not noticed missing the next day like the field of trees. And thereby folks, is the problem.
Out of sight, not even on the public radar.
STOCK ASSESSMENTS
We applaud Fisheries Qld for recently trying to undertake a program of stock assessments using a new stock assessment process called the Stock Synthesis Model. We hoped it must be an improvement on the previous desktop stock assessments based almost solely on recent commercial harvest levels, but results of this new process to date have been less than encouraging unfortunately..
The Spanish mackerel stock assessment came back with stock levels on the east coast being dangerously low compared to the best guess unfished biomass. They landed at a figure of just 17%. Of course this immediately caused alarm bells to ring all over the place and to their credit, Fisheries Qld prioritized action to address this situation. The upshot is the bag limit has been drastically reduced to just one fish per person and the commercial TACC reduced. This would be fine if everyone could be confident that the 17% stock assessment was accurate, but unfortunately almost no one who knows the fishery believes it is correct. The methodology is being challenged and it would appear with some good reason, so time will tell if the stock assessment process, or the way it it is being interpreted, will change. it is hard not to be sceptical of its robustness and accuracy when the same process returns a stock level for King threadfin of 70% of unfished biomass. No one we have met who has been around the place for a long time and knows the inshore fishery well, thinks threadfin stock levels are anywhere close to 70%. Estimates by people who know the fishery, believe it would be somewhere in the region of 30% at best, so once again the methodology and reliability of the estimates are being questioned.
Recreational fishers who have fished Queensland waters for decades, are as one when it comes to the belief that our fish stocks are in serious decline. We know what it used to be like and how bad things are now compared to even 30 years go. But it is almost impossible to prove what we all know, because we just don't have reliable catch figures, historical or current, let alone any sort of credible stock assessments of what's actually out there now.
Commercial catch figures from log book returns were not publicly available after 2006, but have only just recently (2014) become available again through the DAF website. But before you rush off to the site, be warned that it is not a user friendly site and you'll need to be a bit of a computer whiz to get any sort of meaningful commercial catch figures from the data. Nevertheless, they are at least back online and some among us are slowly learning how to find stuff and make sense of it.
Recreational sector catches are even more problematic and unreliable. Every now and again some agency undertakes a snapshot survey of recreational catches, extrapolates the results using very dodgy maths and publishes some rubbery guesstimates of total catch.
Most of the best work on catch monitoring, stock assessments and predictive stock modelling is being done outside the government agencies charged with managing our fisheries. Sadly because of an "only scientists know the answers" mentality within our fisheries agencies, driven largely by professional jealously in our opinion, most of this good work is being ignored and even discredited by officialdom.
Unfortunately, fish are not like a field full of trees. If the trees are there one day, then cut down overnight, it's pretty obvious to everyone what has happened, but a school of fish that are there one day, then in someone's freezer and gone overnight, are not noticed missing the next day like the field of trees. And thereby folks, is the problem.
Out of sight, not even on the public radar.
STOCK ASSESSMENTS
We applaud Fisheries Qld for recently trying to undertake a program of stock assessments using a new stock assessment process called the Stock Synthesis Model. We hoped it must be an improvement on the previous desktop stock assessments based almost solely on recent commercial harvest levels, but results of this new process to date have been less than encouraging unfortunately..
The Spanish mackerel stock assessment came back with stock levels on the east coast being dangerously low compared to the best guess unfished biomass. They landed at a figure of just 17%. Of course this immediately caused alarm bells to ring all over the place and to their credit, Fisheries Qld prioritized action to address this situation. The upshot is the bag limit has been drastically reduced to just one fish per person and the commercial TACC reduced. This would be fine if everyone could be confident that the 17% stock assessment was accurate, but unfortunately almost no one who knows the fishery believes it is correct. The methodology is being challenged and it would appear with some good reason, so time will tell if the stock assessment process, or the way it it is being interpreted, will change. it is hard not to be sceptical of its robustness and accuracy when the same process returns a stock level for King threadfin of 70% of unfished biomass. No one we have met who has been around the place for a long time and knows the inshore fishery well, thinks threadfin stock levels are anywhere close to 70%. Estimates by people who know the fishery, believe it would be somewhere in the region of 30% at best, so once again the methodology and reliability of the estimates are being questioned.
