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Archive -Environment

Building capacity in fish monitoring techniques |16 October 2017

Throughout most of the world, marine fisheries are in crisis. In particular, the protection of spawning aggregations is an issue of global concern. Many of the world’s most productive fisheries are operating in less than optimal conditions with certain stocks having already collapsed - often because fisheries have specifically targeted spawning aggregations, leading in extreme cases to reproductive failure and disappearance of aggregating populations. It is imperative that good fisheries management practices are put in place to ensure this does not happen in Seychelles.

Currently, fishing in the outer islands is described by many as amazing. Large specimens of groupers, snappers and emperors are common in the catch. Many of these fishes are slow growing and late maturing, however, and their stock can be pushed into catastrophic decline by over-fishing. Declining catches of key species in the demersal fishery on the Mahé Plateau are causing many local fishing vessels to venture further away from the Mahé plateau and into the outer islands.

Until relatively recently, fishing around many of the outer islands was conducted at a subsistence level by IDC staff and others living on the islands. The subsistence fishery is not in itself threatening, but increased presence of the local fishing fleet and of foreign-flagged vessels engaged in illegal fishing may be predicted to accumulate into a more serious threat. The need for harvest control rules and for an effective monitoring, control and surveillance programme are clear.

Until now, there has been no clear protocol for monitoring fishing pressure. As a first step, work has been undertaken to standardise subsistence fisheries monitoring protocols, including monitoring of fish spawning aggregations, among the inner and outer islands, and to ensure that data are collected and analysed in a standardised way such that they are directly comparable. This was supported by the Global Environment Facility funded project 'Expansion and strengthening of the protected Area Subsystem of the outer islands of Seychelles and its integration into broader land and seascape'.

To test the protocols, and to build capacity in monitoring subsistence fisheries and spawning aggregations, a 3-day training session was held in September 2017. The training was led by local marine expert Dr Jude Bijoux, assisted by Ameer Ebrahim, a Seychellois PhD student who has been researching the role of herbivorous fish species such as rabbitfish and parrotfish and the influence they have on the resilience of coral reefs in the Seychelles.  Dr Bijoux was also assisted by Ms Aurelie Duhec and Mr Richard Jeanne from ICS. Both have spent years working at Alphonse and Farquhar islands with the IDC fishermen and helped to design the subsistence fisheries monitoring protocol.  15 participants from Island Conservation Society, Green Islands Foundation and the Seychelles National Parks Authority undertook the training, consisting of theoretical sessions, practical sessions at the SFA laboratory, and tested the protocols while diving at Baie Ternay.

A participant from Island Conservation Society said: “Dr Bijoux and his colleagues taught us about the biology of spawning fish, how to dissect and assess their reproductive status, how to conduct fish point counts and assess the body size of fishes underwater. We spent a full day learning how to use “R” statistics to analyse our fish data, and in the process, we learned a lot about how to apply “R” statistics to other data sets we might want to analyse. To me, this was a really excellent workshop!”

 

 

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