Please note: some sections of the transcripts are inaudible. The
amount of time missing is shown in red. Please contact AFMA for any
enquiries regarding the forum.
AFMA – SPF Forum Presentation
17 October 2014
Dr Jim Cavaye
Facilitator
We'll make a start. Welcome, welcome everyone. I'm sorry I'm stuck behind the lectern here,
but we have to do that because we are multimedia people today on camera so we have to deal
with that scenario. But welcome, welcome everyone. I know people have travelled a fair way to
be here and we certainly appreciate that. This is the stakeholder forum for the Small Pelagic
Fishery, hosted by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. My name is Jim, Jim Cavaye
and my background is in rural communities. I have nothing to do directly with fisheries but my
role is to spend our time in the best way possible today so that we get the most out of the time
that we spend together. So I'll be just facilitating our interaction today to make sure that we get
the absolute most from our time together.
This forum is really all about your input. It's about you providing input to AFMA to help make
better decisions, and it's also about deliberation. It's about us having the opportunity to share
views, share ideas and to develop best options for managing the Small Pelagic Fishery. You're
here really because you and your members, if you're in an organisation, you care, you care about
the Small Pelagic Fishery, and this forum is about progressing your input so that the fishery can
be managed in the best possible way. We're planning today to have three main outcomes, these
are the real aims of our time together. First and foremost, it's about your input. We want to hear
your views and have as much say as possible. Secondly, it's about deliberation. It's about
discovering things through discussion and by comparing notes with each other. Thirdly, it's about
you having some input into what the next steps might be to progress the management options for
the fishery. I know many of you have had a long involvement in this, but this is part of the
process of continuing to develop the best possible management options for the fishery.
How we're going to achieve those aims is really in this way. We're going to have three short
updates, technical updates really, about information and science about the fishery, and to bring
you up to speed with the very latest of what we know about the fishery. Then we're going to ask
you to raise issues that you feel are important and that'll be in two contexts. One will be about
what do you think has been the most useful or at least represents progress in terms of best
management of the fishery and secondly, what are the issues that you feel still need to be
addressed? We'll then put them under topics. We'll identify probably, I don't know, it depends on
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what you come up with, but maybe five or six topics, key themes, and we'll have a chance as a
large group to dwell on those and to come up with your suggestions and ideas about progressing
those five or six topics. Then we'll have some discussion about what you see as the next steps.
Again, today is really about your input, that's very much the focus.
Now there are some logistics. If you need the loo, it's just out the door and to the right. If we
need to evacuate the room for whatever reason, the exits are just straight across the corridor
there and straight into the courtyard, that's what we do. I'm assuming that many of you know
each other, and that might be a pretty good assumption, but some of you don't know each other
and so I was keen to have this embarrassing few moments where you say, you know, this is who
I am and this is where I'm from and this is my deep personal secret that I want to share with you,
but I am keen for you to make sure that everyone in the room does know each other. So I'm
going to start here with Tony, a little introduction please?
Dr Tony Smith
CSIRO
Yep. I'm Tony Smith, I'm with the CSIRO just down the road here, and my involvement in the
fishery has been relatively recent but I'm currently leading a project that's reviewing the harvest
strategies, and I'll tell you a little bit about that soon.
Ass Prof Tim Ward
South Australian Research and Development Institute
Tim Ward from Sardine South Australia. I've been doing some work on the sardine fishery there
for quite some time [0:04:39]. I've been involved in the Small Pelagic Fishery for quite a while as
well, and what I'm going to talk about today is some of the research that we've been doing over
the last couple of years into trying to better understand stocks.
Audience Member
Allan Hansard from the Australian Recreational Fishing Foundation.
Audience Member
I'm Bruce [0:05:02] with the [0:05:03] Head of Science and Innovation [0:05:06] and I was
nominated to come here just to find out bits and pieces that may be of interest [0:05:16].
Audience Member
I'm Danielle Kuhn. I'm the Communications Manager at AFMA.
Audience Member
Brad [0:05:21]. I'm with [0:05:22] in Tasmania and within the [0:05:24] section for [0:05:26]
fisheries.
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Audience Member
Patrick Sachs.
I work as the AFMA liaison officer to the Australian Recreational Fishing
Foundation.
Audience Member
Nick Lloyd from [0:05:36] here in Tasmania.
Audience Member
John McGiveron. I'm President of the TAS Game Fishing Association.
Audience Member
Geoff Fisher. I'm representing the Game Fishing Association of Victoria.
Audience Member
Evan Jones. I'm a conservation officer for Game Fishing Association of Australia, and I'm also
an IGFA rep.
Audience Member
Brett Cleary. I'm President of the Game Fishing Association of Australia and board member of
the Australian Recreational Fishing Foundation.
Audience Member
I'm John Neville. I've been a long-time critic of AFMA, and I was reluctantly brought into the
supertrawl issue a couple of years. I'm now [0:06:20] retired and [0:06:24].
Audience Member
I'm Judy Lynne, an executive officer for Sunfish Queensland and I'm a director of ARFF.
Dr Nick Rayns
Executive Manager of Fisheries, AFMA
Nick Rayns, the executive manager of fisheries at AFMA. In my previous lives, I've been the
Northern Territory Director of Fisheries, New South Wales Director of Fisheries and [0:06:42]
Corporation Board. Thank you.
Jim Cavaye
Thank you very much. We appreciate you travelling and being here with us today. I'm just going
to start with Nick Rayns to give his own words of welcome and Nick is the Executive Director of
the Fisheries Management at AFMA, and Nick will also then talk about the management
measures, including localised depletion of the Small Pelagic Fisheries. Thanks Nick.
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Nick Rayns
Thank you very much. Before I start, I'd just like to say thank you all for being here. This is a
tough job and it's, as Jim has said, those who are passionate about it turn up, and it's good to
see such a great turnout from the recreational fishing community and previous discussions with
you and involvement with you lets me know very well that you do care about this fishery a great
deal. So thank you fall for being here and this is a real effort by AFMA to listen to its critics who
previously had told us that we didn't get down to the grassroots well enough and listen to what
was being said, that's why we're holding this as one of a first forum, it won't be the last. I can
already say that we're planning something similar in January/February next year, a time to be
announced of course, but that will pick up on what comes out of this meeting. It will also deal
with some of the reports that were hopefully coming out between now and then, including from
the expert panel which is due to report to the Minister of Environment shortly.
So we do want your views. Your views will be provided to the Resource Assessment Group for
this fishery, as well as the Management Advisory Committee, and directly to the AFMA
Commission. So please take this chance to work with us to think wisely and well about how we
best manage some of the key issues in this fishery. So I'm going to kick off just by introducing
myself, you know me. Now we've got Tim who's going to talk more about the latest of the egg
surveys and what's happening in the scientific area in terms of the old water stuff. Tony is here
as well, Tony is going to focus more on the harvest strategy. CSIRO have been doing some
good work around doing some updated things about how we actually work out harvest rates and
are they appropriate for each of the species in the fishery, which is a key leader into how we set
the total allowable catches. Thank you. Press very hard, for those who come after me. So that's
what I'm doing. Thank you.
First of all, many of you will be familiar with this, about the fishery itself. We manage it from
southern Western Australia right around to Southern Queensland. Currently it's in roughly two
zones, split down the middle in Tasmania. That is the stock information we have at the moment,
and we may come back to talk a bit more about that. We are learning more as we go, as we do
in all our fisheries, about stock structure and how we best manage it, but at the moment, that's
the layout. The hatched area on the upper right hand side is actually the first of the sardine
fishery that AFMA directly manages outside of three nautical miles in that area. The remainder of
the fishery the sardine fisheries is managed by the relevant states, etc.
So the species. Busy slide. You've got those in front of you if you want to look carefully but it's
really just to show you that we are dealing with four key species of fish. They do have different
biologies, and again I think Tony will touch on this when he talks about the work he's been doing
on the harvest strategies, but useful material to think about; how do these fish grow and age and
reproduce, etc.?
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I want to dwell on this slide for a moment because it's quite important and hard to read from
where you are but again please use your packs if you want to look at the detail. It really shows
you what the various parts of fisheries management are. The outer circle talking more about the
legislative regime in which we work. The ecosystem in which the fishery operates. As we move
in, we talk about the fishery itself, particularly around the management system and management
planning. Within the middle of that, there's part of that process is the harvest strategy, with its
key objectives and performance indicators and decision rules around how harvest rates should
be calculated. AFMA's role in those three circles changes as you go through them. As you move
towards the middle, we play a greater and greater role.
So on the outside, a lot of those
legislative changes and settings that we work with and are dealt with by the likes of parliament on
advice from departments, etc.
As you move into the fishery, yes we develop fishery
management plans but again ministers and others sign those off, we don't do that on our own.
When we get down to an actual harvest strategy, that's our bread and butter stuff, that's what we
do in pretty much all our fisheries across the Commonwealth, spend a lot of time in that space.
So a bit about AFMA's management of the SPF, and one thing I want to say is the sort of
headings we have and the content of these next few slides are quite common for all our fisheries.
So when I talk about objectives, using catch controls to manage, those sort of things are common
across pretty much all AFMA fisheries. There's one or two notable exceptions but pretty much
common.
So our objective particularly in the SPF is to have conservative harvest rates. We know, like you,
the harvest rates for small pelagic fisheries should be kept conservative because they're an
important food source for a lot of other predatory species and a key part of the ecosystem. So
you'll see unlike a lot of our other fish species where we fish our stocks quite hard, we fish a lot of
the predatory species below 50% of their initial biomass, but these species we keep them well
above because we know we've got to take more care of them. Our catch control management
revolves around having limits on catch and so it doesn't matter sort of gear you use necessarily
or what size your boat is or anything like that, it's your catch that matters because that's what
keeps the rest of the biomass in the water.
Assessments of east and west zones. As I said, we have this split at the moment. I think some
of the other speakers may talk a little bit more about that. We are discovering more and more
about the stock structure of these species, and I think that will be brought to bear as we develop
and continue this fishery into the future. Egg surveys are one of the key things Tim will be
speaking of in terms of how we use the best science we can to set those harvest rates.
One of the key issues that we have in this fisheries and many others is bio-catch, and in the
Small Pelagic Fishery, we have a compulsory requirement in midwater trawl to use seal excluder
devices that have been heavily tested, they also assist with dolphin escapement as well but
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they're mainly for seals, and we have worked on that as a project over many years and have a
very, very good track record now of seeing most of the seals escape from these nets. Not just in
this fishery, they're also used in areas like the Blue Grenadier Fishery of the west coast of
Tasmania during the winter period.
In terms of stakeholder consultation, AFMA does run a statutory process. We are required to
have management advisory committees for our key fisheries, that is set management plans and
under law and the law also talks about who should be on those committees and so we are
required to set those up in the way that is specified. We took that a step further about a decade
ago when we formally set up resource assessment groups, which are very similar to
management advisory committees but they focus on the science rather than the management,
and structure them in a similar way. It's become very clear to us now that while those things are
good, things can be better. I think one of the messages we've received over the last couple of
years in this fishery is that those forums are good but they're not good enough, they may not be
getting in and talking to the people who have an interest in this fishery often enough or directly
enough for us to make sure we're getting the best advice we can, and that's one of the reasons
why we're here today.
So just a pictorial there of the two fishing methods, midwater trawl and purse seining which is the
other method I haven't spoken about much or used in the fishery. Both don't have any bottom
impacts on the sea floor. They are very different methods but both used in this fishery. There's a
reasonable picture of a seal excluder device. If you look at the top right hand corner, you can
actually see a seal escaping through the hood that sits at the top of the net. There's actually a
great behind the hood that lets the fish through but pushes the seal up through the escapement
hatch. I'll work on a better picture I think on that one but it's in your pack too to have a look at
more closely.
So the other thing AFMA does a lot of is monitor fishing activity. We don't just set up the
management arrangements and let people go fishing. We have a very, very stringent monitoring
regime and compliance regime, probably one of the strongest in the world.
Every
Commonwealth boat has a GPS attached to it that we can monitor 24/7. Pretty much most
people at AFMA, if they have access to the system, are able to see all Commonwealth fishing
boats and exactly where they are every day of the year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So
that's one thing that makes sure we know where our boats are, and that system is increasingly
being used by some states and overseas countries as well. It's a really, really good way of
managing and monitoring fishing activity. We also have an observer program which we've run for
many years since the 1970s and that is a risk-based program. By that, I mean the level of
observer coverage depends on the risks we assess to be in the fishery. So if you look across our
fisheries, that observer coverage can vary from anything from 5% of fishing trips to 100% of
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fishing trips depending on the risk assessment, and our compliance guys and others do that sort
of work to make sure we've got our resources put in the right place to make sure we're keeping
an eye on things.
It's also our major source, or one of our major sources of scientific information. We collect a lot
of data from our observers about what's going on on board the fishing boats, what they're
catching, how they're catching it, working with the industry to solve problems on the back of the
deck too. So you can read a bit more about that address if you're interested in our compliance
program and how it works.
So thanks to Tim for this one, the best slide I've seen yet in terms of the full chronological history
since the mid-1980s of catches in the Small Pelagic Fishery. As you can see, they've been
highly variable, both in terms of amount and in terms of the species caught. So there's quite a lot
of originally – looking at jack mackerel back in the early 80s and 90s, that switched over to
redbait during the 2000s with some mixes of sardine and other species in there as well. So that's
a graphical representation of what's been taken over the years, maxing out at about 40,000
tonnes in the highest year, but during the 2000s probably maxing out at around 15,000 tonnes
with a different mix of species.
So back in the early days, what happened to those fish when they were caught? Mainly by purse
seining by the way back then, not midwater trawl. They were used down here in Tasmania for
fish meal, oil for aquaculture feed, they were fed to SBT, used as bait for commercial and
recreational use, some human consumption and some pet food. So a whole variety of things
there. These days, with much lower catches, most of the catch goes – quite small catches go as
bait.
So that's really the end of a brief discussion about the fishery and what it does and how it works.
I know the issue of localised depletion has been a perennial one with the recreational fishing
sector, and I think it's worth focusing on that at this meeting because we have made some
progress but I think it's (a) important to report back to this group what that progress has been in
terms of a working definition, etc but also to talk more about does this do it for you, does this
definition work for you and what are the responses, what are the appropriate responses to that?
That's part of what I'd like to talk about today.
So this comes from our Resource Assessment Group.
You can read it for yourselves.
A
persistent reduction in fish abundance in a limited area caused by fishing activity over spatial and
temporal scales it causes a negative impact on predatory species and/or other fisheries. So
that's a working definition. It's not final, AFMA hasn't accepted it or anything like that, but that's
what they're working with at the moment. When they drew that definition up, they talked about –
they gave a number of considerations about okay, in working out that definition, what sort of
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things were taken into account? So they talked about species mobility; these are highly mobile
small pelagic species. Geographic barriers do matter. There is some stock structuring out there
for these species as well.
Localised depletion is not the same as range change or changes in overall abundance which
need to be dealt with in a different way. Localised depletion can lead to user conflict – I think
that's a fairly straightforward honest statement – but is not always the cause. The Small Pelagic
Fishery definition may not be applicable to all fisheries. So you can work something up for this
fishery that might work but you shouldn't blindly go applying it everywhere else because you may
need to think about the biology of the species, its distribution, who's actually accessing the
fishery, etc. So we'll come back to think. I think we'll return to that slide once I've finished.
Now another thing we did was have a look around a bit and see what other people were actually
doing about localised depletion because where that risk is believed to be what happens so with
the Alaskan Polack Fisheries, they've got an issue with sea lions and they work out spatial and
seasonal subareas for their TACs, their total allowable catches, for their fisheries to reduce the
local removal of too many of these sea lions perhaps from the one colony, etc.
The South African Pelagic Fishery which is a big one, they've got spatial closures for sardine and
anchovy which are highly effective – I want to come back to that because there's a newsflash on
that one – in terms of increasing the number of African Penguins that breed and feed primarily on
these species. It's just been raised with me that in fact, the consensus on that is not quite as
clear as I've presented it there and indeed I've got a one page article here from the very, very
latest nature magazine which takes up that contestable approach which I'll provide to you all after
this meeting, and talks about the different views amongst the scientific community about how
successful has this really been; perhaps it has been successful in some areas with some parts of
the fishery but perhaps not in others. That's one of the key things for us to think about; will one
solution solve all the problems or do we need to think carefully about what problem we're trying to
solve and what are the appropriate solutions to solve it and perhaps in various areas of the
fishery.
More locally the South Australian sardine Fishery, which I'm sure Tim will speak some more
about shortly has taken around 30,000 tonnes of fish a year, from a relatively modest area in the
Southern Spencer Gulf, and an ecosystem assessment has been done and has identified that
localised depletion is not of great concern in that fishery. The sardine fishery has a spatial
management framework to limit the proportion of catch taken from the Southern Spencer Gulf. It
introduced some size-based performance measures as well. So again, some useful guidance
and perhaps ideas might come from South Australia in terms of how we handle things in the
Commonwealth Small Pelagic Fishery.
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One thing I do want to add in terms of – and I'll make sure this goes out to you all as well – I
always wondered about whether this is just a commercial issue or does it affect other sectors? I
recently read an article from the Northern Territory Government called Where Have All The Reef
Fish Gone? It's pretty clear from that while we deal with some of the issues in our larger
commercial fisheries or bigger fish stocks, this issue of localised depletion and how to respond to
it is equally relevant and prevalent in recreational fisheries around Australia as well. So again, it
might be useful to look at some of the solutions they're coming up with in terms of how we might
manage things here.
So one of the things the Small Pelagic Resource Assessment Group came up with, and it's really
a straw man so again no decision made but just some ideas building on what I've said about how
others have looked at this issue, is to come up with this idea of some sort of sub-structuring of
how the catches might be taken in the fishery. By that, I mean perhaps if a percentage of a total
allowable catch is taken in one of these squares, you have to move on to another square for a
period of time before you can return to that area to fish at a future date.
That's certainly
something that the Resource Assessment Group is having a close look at, to see whether that's
feasible both from a management point of view but also does it deliver on the issues of potential
localised depletion.
So to finish, I think we need to discuss a couple of things and then a lot of things that you may
also wish to add. One is that working definition of localised depletion, is it good enough, should
we tweak it a bit, do we need to look elsewhere for a better definition? That's one question.
Secondly, how should we manage any risk of localised depletion in the fishery, and what are we
trying to achieve in doing so? Are we doing it for ecological reasons? Are we doing it for
economic reasons? Are we doing it for social reasons? Is it a combination? I think we need to
be clear on that as well. So in putting ideas forward we need to be clear on why and what
problem they're to solve.
Lastly, as Jim says, this is largely your forum. I'm not going to in any way limit you to those first
two, if you want to talk about other things about the fishery, about how it's managed or the
science or whatever, that’s what this forum is for, to have that discussion. So I might finish there,
Jim. Thank you.
Jim Cavaye
Okay.
Thank you, Nick.
I'll just squeeze in beside you here.
There's plenty of time for
discussion today but I was going to ask, is there one burning question for Nick? Anything that
someone's not going to sleep tonight unless they raise a question of him right now? Happy to
move on? Yes, John?
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Audience Member
Just a quick [0:27:43]. Nick, you mentioned that the composition, the species composition of the
stock has varied greatly over the last couple of decades. Now, what do you put that down to?
Nick Rayns
Catch composition has varied, that's correct. I think a couple of things. My understanding is that
when the fishery first developed it was based on purse seining, which is a surface method of
fishing, and there were quite abundant jack mackerel, especially off eastern Tasmania at that
time that were harvested by that method in that area. As time went by, there appear to have
been some oceanographic changes which has meant those surface schools of jack mackerel
have moved deeper and as a result the composition changed most recently with a focus on
midwater trawling for redbait which is a different species.
We think, like everything, the ocean environment is very dynamic and it does change, and Tim
may touch on this too in terms of what he's finding in the sardine fishery and maybe even Tony
for international. So we're not dealing with a static environment and so part of the response of
the fishery, if it's trying to catch fish, will be to choose methods and areas and species that
delivery what they want. Sometimes it's easier to catch things by seining at the surface, and
other times it's easier to catch them deeper using midwater trawl.
Audience Member
It's also worth noting that that's the total catch for the fishery, so it includes sardine catches that
are taken off New South Wales and Victoria, as well as catches off Tasmania. So it is a bit of a
mixed bag. To really get the changes, you need to drill down [0:29:29] as well.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Thanks. We'll move on. So the next update – yes, Allan, go ahead.
Audience Member
Why are we looking at the sardine fishery as well? There seems to be a bit of an introduction in
here of the sardine fishery with the SPF.
Nick Rayns
The sardine fishery is part of the SPF, Allan. I think that earlier map I showed you, AFMA
actually does manage part of the sardine fishery on the east coast and we have arrangements in
place with the states in terms of the states that manage the sardine fishery of the southern and
western part of the Small Pelagic Fishery.
Commonwealth manages.
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So we actually do have a sardine fishery the
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Audience Member
I understand that, it's just that the focus has been upon, you know, the other SPF fishery, I think,
rather than the sardine fishery, and I'm just interested why it's been brought together?
Nick Rayns
From AFMA's point of view, it's always been part of the Small Pelagic Fishery, it's never been
separated. So those four species I showed you earlier have always been components of the
Small Pelagic Fishery from our point of view.
Audience Member
Okay. So how should we treat this in relation to say you're looking at fishing methods then that
will come up later, do we treat them as one or do we take the SPF fishery which is the jack
mackerel, redbait, blue mackerel separately to the sardine fishery?
Nick Rayns
Well, in terms of methods, midwater trawl is primarily used for jack mackerel and redbait but
seining methods, purse seining is used for both sardine and blue mackerel, and you can take
blue mackerel by midwater trawls. There's no necessarily clear division in terms of if you look at
the methods and the species between the two, there's quite a lot of overlap.
Jim Cavaye
Thank you. Thank you, Allan. These are questions that we can discuss later when we get a
chance for you to have your input. So the second update we're going to have is from Tim Ward.
Tim is from the South Australian Research and Development Institute and he will be just updating
us about the 2014 Egg Survey for jack mackerel, blue mackerel and the Australian sardines.
Thank you Tim.
Tim Ward
Thank you. So this is the work that we're doing for the Commonwealth Small Pelagic Fishery
over the last couple of years and some stuff that we're planning on doing as well.
Okay. So this is an outline of what's been going on. For the last few years, I've been leading an
ongoing project which is about monitoring and assessment of the Small Pelagic Fishery, that's
funded through AFMA and that's a project to put together the information that we have and to
comment on the status of the stocks and to make recommendations about future management.
That's critical input to the harvest strategy.
Some of you would know, and some of you do know, we also had a workshop and stakeholder
forum in Adelaide earlier this year where we had some international experts and we
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benchmarked Australian Small Pelagic Fisheries, particularly the South Australian sardine
Fishery but also the Small Pelagic Fishery against how things are done worldwide, and that was
really quite a useful experience. The first couple of days were really focused on some very
technical issues and the last couple were much more around stakeholder issues and some of the
eco system impacts. We've also done a project which is looking at again some of the very
technical aspects of how we calculate biomass, particularly how we estimate egg production. As
you'll see the critical element of the approach we take is to try and estimate the number of eggs
produced. It's quite a complex set of procedures that are in place to do that and there's some
different approaches taken around the world and so one of the things we did at the workshop
was compare some of the approaches that we're taking, and what we're doing in this other
project is to try and work through different approaches that may be suitable in different situations.
Really, that's the finding that we've had that one method doesn't fit all situations, that distributions
vary and you need to do it differently in different circumstances.
But onto the main element of the talk today, I'm going to talk about a survey that we did in
January which was around jack mackerel and Sardine off the east coast, again applying this daily
egg production method.
I'll show you some work that we've done much more recently,
August/September a little further north, looking at blue mackerel, Australian sardine and Taylor.
While I don't have too many results from that, we certainly can show you where it went and
there's another project that is going on that I have some involvement in, and that's what Tony's
going to talk about next, which is the review and update of the harvest strategy.
So this is the places that we went to take egg samples. We used a boat called the Dell Richey II
which operates out of Tasmania, and those black dots in each of those locations we took a
vertical plankton sample and the objective of those samples is to try and estimate the distribution
and abundance of eggs. So you'll see that the coverage was very large, the intensity of the
sampling was very high, and they're the sort of things that you need to get robust estimates of
biomass. You need to cover the sporting area and you need to take enough samples to be able
to estimate egg production with some confidence.
Audience Member
Can you tell us the distance between each of those transects, or an approximate?
Tim Ward
I think it's 15 nautical miles between samples and three between transects and three between
sites. I think. I can certainly confirm that. It was about 300 samples and we found that's about a
number you need to get some precision into your estimates of egg production.
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Audience Member
Were there any done in [0:36:21] or it was just [0:36:23]?
Tim Ward
No, the surveys that we have done is focused on the east. I think the expectation is that's where
the effort is likely to occur in the short term and we've deliberately focused on those stocks, and
as I said, these ones are around jack mackerel and Australian sardine. But the other component
of this method is not only to estimate egg abundance and eventually egg production, how many
eggs were produced, we also need to know how many eggs are produced per unit weight of fish.
If you know how many eggs are produced in the spawning area and how many eggs are
produced per unit weight of fish, then it's a relatively simple calculation to estimate the adult
biomass, the spawning biomass, that's required to produce that many eggs.
So to do that you need to get representative samples of the adults. So we hadn't had this
information previously and so this was really quite important. So we used a vessel called The
Western Alliance out of Lakes Entrance and we modified a demersal trawl net to fish quite high.
It was a semi-pelagic net, is one of the ways of describing it, and we went and sampled at these
sits. You can see that these sites were largely focused around the bottom end of the distribution
of the egg survey, and there are reasons for that because this is where thought that the heart of
the jack mackerel stock was likely to lie.
This is some information. One of the critical things obviously in these sort of studies is to make
sure that you identify the eggs correctly. For sardines, it's relatively straightforward because the
eggs are different from all the other – they're quite large, they're readily identifiable.
Jack
mackerel eggs are much more difficult. There's some similar species, particularly yellowtail scad.
What we've found that we can – we did some genetic work and we're confident that we can
distinguish them from all other species based solely on their size. So the characteristics of eggs,
including their size, allows us to identify them with confidence.
Audience Member
So, that genetic work has been completed and you can confirm this now?
Tim Ward
Yep, and it will be in the final report.
So this is the densities of jack mackerel eggs from the surveys. You can see in the background
there's the temperature ranges and you can see that most of the jack mackerel eggs were caught
in that area between Victoria, there were some down interestingly off Triabunna but most of the
high density areas were in Bass Strait. We caught about 4,500 to 5,000 eggs distributed as you
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see there. So certainly, one of the good things is that that matches up quite closely with the
places that we collected adults in the trawls.
Audience Member
I've just got a quick question. How long does it take to shoot the net that does these vertical pulls
to gather the eggs?
Tim Ward
Not very long, it's quick.
The thing that takes time is getting between stations.
So under
10 minutes.
So these are the densities of Sardine eggs. Interestingly, coincide pretty much with the sort of
areas where we found the jack mackerel egg. That’s probably not what we expected. Not much
spawning up on the mainland east coast, it was clearly Bass Strait was where it was happening.
This has some interesting implications for some of the other surveys that I'll show you in a
moment. Yep?
Audience Member
Just on the sardines, the sardine fishery is based in South Australia, isn't it? Thirty thousand
tonne a year?
Tim Ward
Yeah. So…
Audience Member
In those samples taken, the western [0:40:34] which is where South Australia sits, is the
spawning ground for that stock in the area that you're looking in the eastern region?
Tim Ward
No. No. On Wednesday, I presented a very similar sort of talk to the South Australian sardine
industry. I talked about the biomass and egg surveys that we've done to support the South
Australian Sardine Fishery. This is explicitly work that has been done for the Small Pelagic
Fishery and the eastern zone.
Audience Member
If I may, Tim, I think there seems to be a little bit confusion a little bit about Allan's question, there
is some confusion within the group about the sardine fishery.
Tim Ward
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Okay. Let's try and get rid of that confusion once and for all. Nick, I think put it well. If you were
to go back to Nick's map, there's that area, the small shaded area of the Small Pelagic Fishery,
where sardines are a Commonwealth species and are explicitly part of the Small Pelagic Fishery.
For the rest of Australia, it's a state-based species. So I work for South Australian Government
and I do stock assessments of the South Australian Fishery, and I think explicitly the AFMA and
the Commonwealth have chosen to take some of the approaches that we've developed in South
Australia for the last 15 years and try to apply them in the Commonwealth Fishery, which has a
small sardine component outside of three nautical miles off New South Wales and Southern
Queensland.
Audience Member
So Tim, you do a similar survey for sardines in South Australia across the Great Australia Bight?
Tim Ward
Yes.
Audience Member
So there's not a similar coverage – so Tim said no because he's saying they do that in the state
fishery. So yes, there are similar surveys for sardines in South Australia and the western zone
but they're for South Australia, not for Nick's mob. So that is correct, the question?
Audience Member
Yeah, that was the question.
Jim Cavaye
Now that does clarify everything for everyone?
Audience Member
I think the other important thing is that the tonnage that's taken out of the South Australian state
fishery isn't included in the AFMA [0:42:49] catches.
Jim Cavaye
Are there any other doubts about the sardine inclusion issue? Okay. Let's move on. Tim?
Tim Ward
We can't seem to go backwards. If you can just go up backwards, please? Up further, further.
All right. That's where we were.
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So this is just the sardine cost off the east coast. Grant might want to comment that there's
thoughts about development of a sardine fishery off Tasmania. There is a sardine fishery off
Victoria and there is a sardine fishery off New South Wales.
This is the results of the trawl survey. These are the adult samples. To understand the number
of eggs that are produced per unit weight of fish, you need to know four things. You need to
know the relative size and weights of the males and females. You need to know the sex ratio.
You need to know how often a female spawns, they usually spawn something like once a week.
You need to know how many eggs are produced each time they spawn. So these adult samples
are the ones that we use to estimate those parameters.
20 samples.
You can see that we have about
We had something like 2,700 fish spread across that area to provide us with
estimates of those. I've got another student at the moment trying to understand how those
patterns vary in space and time, and to ensure that if we do this again that we get as
representative samples as we can but certainly these are the first, and I think really valuable,
estimates of these parameters for these species in Australia. Being able to estimate, to get good
samples like these, was a critical part of the development in the South Australian sardine fishery
because it allowed us to get a handle on biomass. So I think these samples are really important
for the development of our understanding of the biomass off the east coast of jack mackerel.
So jack mackerel, just to summarise, the first study to collect adult samples for estimation of adult
parameters. We think that they provide unbiased estimates of those parameters because they
were collected during the day when the fish had dispersed, we weren't targeting either spawning
or non-spawning schools, we had good coverage of depth and latitude over the area where the
spawning occurred, as evidenced by the eggs. So we think they're good samples.
Probably the downside is we got relatively few females with hydrated alesites. They're the ones
that we use to estimate how many eggs are released each time a female spawns, and we'll have
to do more work there but that's not a parameter that has a major impact on the spawning
biomass. The critical parameter is how often the female spawns.
The large number of adult and egg samples that we collected from the same location at the same
time gives us some confidence that we will be able to come up with robust estimates of the
spawning biomass of jack mackerel off the east coast, which is a good thing. What we don't
know is what proportion of the adult population occurred outside the spawning area during the
spawning period. We only estimate the spawning biomass. Evan?
Audience Member
Tim, did you develop a temperature egg development key at all?
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Tim Ward
No.
Audience Member
Or a nutrient egg development key for this mob?
Tim Ward
No.
Nutrient egg development key is an interesting one because they use their yolk while
hatching. Temperature development keys have been developed elsewhere, we didn't do those
experiments in this study. We have done some sensitivity analysis as part of the sardine work.
Really, they don't have a great influence on estimates of egg production.
Australian sardine. Interestingly, eggs came from the same locations as the jack mackerel. It's
likely that in this case a very significant amount of the adult biomass occurred outside the
spawning area further north but it wasn't spawning during that period. We didn't collect any
Australian sardine during the study. What we can do here is use adult parameters sourced from
the literature and do sensitivity analysis as we've done before.
I think the message for me here is these surveys are not likely to give a robust estimate of the
total adult biomass of sardine off the east coast, it's likely to give us a much smaller number. The
surveys that I'm going to talk about in a minute are likely to give us a better understanding of that
but I think that there are some interesting questions raised from this survey rules, and I see Grant
nodding his head down there, about whether or not this patch of sardines is somewhat different
from the sardines along the east coast, and we're thinking about doing some genetic work to help
with that question.
So this is the survey that we've more recently completed for blue mackerel, Australian sardine
and Taylor off the east coast. It was done in August/September and any of you live up in
southern Queensland/northern New South Wales, will know that the weather during this period
was horrendous and a two week survey basically took us a month to do. This is where we went.
It's the same sort of design, just moved a little further north to match the location where these fish
spawn during that period. Again, we collected some examples fixed in ethanol to support some
further genetic work. In this case, we've done the genetic work on blue mackerel, here we're
trying to validate the identification of the Taylor eggs, and we also got Taylor adults off Fraser
Island which I'll talk about in a minute.
This is the locations that we trawled. We were targeting blue mackerel in these trawls. It worked
so well for jack mackerel that we felt that we had to go out and see if it would work for blue
mackerel. Of course, it wasn't that straightforward. We caught lots of blue mackerel but they
were mostly juveniles and not spawning. So that didn't go as well as we would have liked. So
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how we're going to collect samples of blue mackerel is something we need to continue to work
on.
We did collect some samples of sardines in the trawls which is something I've wanted to try off
South Australia for some time. So it was useful to know that this sort of set up would catch us
sardines. We got adult samples from Fraser Island which is really valuable, we might even get a
biomass estimate for Taylor which would be useful, and we also got samples of sardine from the
fishery out of Iluka. Yep?
Audience Member
Is there any particular reason [0:50:15]?
Tim Ward
Trawlable ground. There's a lot of hard bottom in there. We tried to spread it out as much as we
could but through here there's not a lot of ground that can be trawled.
Audience Member
So these were on the bottom?
Tim Ward
The fish are on the bottom. The net is modified demersal trawl. So during the day, these fish go
down to the bottom. They tend to come up to the surface of a night, but during the day they go
down to the bottom and spread out, which is good because it means that you can sample them in
a situation where they haven't broken up into spawning and non-spawning schools so you get
good estimates of those parameters that I was talking about. Yeah, and that seems to have
worked.
Midwater trawling is another way that you could sample these things. Overseas, people do that
of a night.
The problem with sample of a night though is that they have aggregated into
spawning and non-spawning schools so you either tend to get really high estimates of things like
spawning fraction or really low estimates. Whereas, during the day when they're spread out on
the bottom, we think that you get a less biased or unbiased estimates of those parameters.
Audience Member
But you're not expecting any impact on sampling areas?
Tim Ward
Look, if we had our [0:51:37] we'd have a structured sampling design by latitude and depth and,
you know, was all very nice and neat but the reality is the ground doesn't allow us to do that. So
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basically we needed to work with the fisherman who fished in this area, and they said, you know,
these are the places that you can go. Obviously we tried to get as good coverage as possible.
As I said, if we could have fished through in here, we would have.
Audience Member
But [0:52:06] that's not where you did your egg surveys, that's not plankton samples?
Tim Ward
That's where we did the plankton samples.
Audience Member
So the previous one is purely where you try and catch fish to get the data to plug into your egg
samples to get the
Tim Ward
Yes. Yep. And I think the most critical thing, some of these parameters can vary by latitude or
depth so trying to have coverage across as much of the area where you collect eggs is probably
ideal but…
Audience Member
My question actually was…
Tim Ward
Why didn't we go here? Sorry?
Audience Member
No, that wasn't the question. That was the original question. My subsequent question to that
was in that area, is it an assumption that the lack of sampling in that area between [0:52:52] had
no bearing on results?
I understand why it hasn't been done, what I'm asking is so the
expectation is that would have no bearing on the results?
Tim Ward
So there's two answers or two parts to the answer. That area will have bearing on the results
based on the egg abundances that we find there, but when we apply the adult parameters we
use the averages across the entire area. So this one, the excise from the estimate – because
the estimate of the spawning area is determined by the egg distributions.
Jim Cavaye
Is that okay?
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Audience Member
Well, I guess that's one of the errors are inherent in this sort of model, is that you're averaging
your egg across that entire area whereas in fact we know the most accurate way to do it is to
actually multiply your adult egg production and match that to your egg concentration in that area.
That's in fact what should be done rather than an average.
Audience Member
From a statistical point of view, that's not always the case because there's what's called a mean
bias or a variance bias trader and so taking small sample sizes from small areas and applying
them doesn't necessarily give you a better estimate than an average over large area
assumptions.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Let's take this noted and let's give Tim a chance to finish.
Tim Ward
Okay. Yep. We're just about done.
So this is the schedule for completion. We've got an assessment report in March. jack mackerel
and Sardine report is due in end of October. I think I'm going to have to seek a milestone change
because I don't think it's going to be done by the end of October but it will certainly be finished by
the end of the year. The benchmarking workshop and forum, the report's due out the draft final in
January.
The blue mackerel and Taylor is in September of next year, and the Improving
Estimates of Egg Production is in November. So it's good that these projects are working in
parallel. We're looking at some of those new techniques that we're developing and seeing how
those affect the estimates of biomass. So it's pretty exciting times, there's certainly looks of work
being done.
Jim Cavaye
Thank you Tim. Now we do have time for one burning question if there's another for Tim. Okay.
Happy to move on. Again, this is about your discussion so we're moving towards you having a
good discussion about these issues in a moment but before we do, we're going to move to Tony
Smith. Tony Smith is from CSIRO in Tasmania, and Tony is going to give us a re-examination of
the harvest rules for the Small Pelagic Fishery. Thanks Tony.
Tony Smith
Thanks Jim. I've got the happy task of trying to explain to you how the harvest strategies work.
Can we have the slide up?
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So as you're probably aware, the Commonwealth Fisheries Management has a harvest strategy
policy and so what I'm talking about here is pretty much – I mean, there are different strategies
you obviously use for different fisheries but this is a more or less standard approach that's been
applied across all Commonwealth managed fisheries.
So I'm going to just quickly talk about what is a harvest strategy, I'll describe in a little bit more
detail about how the current Small Pelagic Fishery strategy works. I'll talk about the review that
we've been doing for the last eight or nine months, some of the results from that and what the
next steps are.
So a harvest strategy is basically the set of rules used to make decisions about catch or egg
levels in the fishery. If you think about this fishery for the target species, you set TACs, so how
are those TACs actually set; there's an explicit set of rules how that's done and those rules have
to be compliant with the Commonwealth Harvest Strategy Policy.
So typically, you make
decisions every year, you set a TAC for example. The input in this case is from the work that
Tim's just been describing which is the egg surveys and the estimates if biomass, I'll come to this
again in a minute, and then there are a set of rules that translate that information on how many
fish are out there into a management decision, which is a TAC.
So for the current Small Pelagic Fishery Harvest Strategy, the input, as I said, is the latest egg
survey. There are actually three tiers. I know some of you are already familiar with this, but tiers
are based on different levels of information and in particular how recent the information is on
stock size. So if there's been a survey in the last five years we're at tier 1, if the survey's older
than five years, it's tier 2, and if there's been no recent survey we're down to tier 3, and there are
different rules that apply for each of those.
So the TAC is set using a harvest rate applied to the most recent survey estimate. So it's a
proportion of that estimate. So for example, at tier 2, the harvest rate currently is 7.5% so if the
most recent stock size is 10,000 tonnes, the TAC is 7.5% of that. So for the current harvest
strategy, the harvest rate is at tier 1 average at – sorry, yep?
Audience Member
So can I ask up on the east coast how many egg surveys have been done over the last say
15 years?
Tony Smith
I think others can probably answer that better than I can.
Audience Member
Tim?
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Tim Ward
There's been several surveys done for blue mackerel. We used some of that data from those
surveys to look at jack mackerel. There have been dedicated surveys for redbait and there has
been several studies of sardine as part of that work as well.
Audience Member
So are we talking…
Tim Ward
Individually or the total?
Audience Member
The total.
Tim Ward
Something like a dozen, I think, maybe a bit more.
Audience Member
And that would be over the entire time series? I'm just trying to get some idea of the frequency.
So you've done one this year that you've just presented. When was the previous egg survey
done on that sort of scale?
Tim Ward
There was a very intensive effort in 2004 targeted around blue mackerel. Later than that, around
redbait, [1:00:57] about 2008/9 [1:01:07].
Audience Member
Could I suggest and [1:01:12] collate those for you and provide those to [1:01:16] all those
surveys that have been undertaken are referenced properly so that you can be reassured
[1:01:23] occurred.
Audience Member
Because I guess the issue that we all know that small pelagics is a wide inter-annual variability
and so the risk that comes from taking one sample in time and applying that magnifies the risk of
[1:01:43]. So you're not doing it annually, you're not doing it once every four years or five years,
because of the inter-annual variability that occurs and we know that for small pelagic fisheries
around the world, then your risk increases.
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Audience Member
So you might be getting wrong. They might be getting it wrong on a very high tier, they might be
sampling it on a very low tier.
Tony Smith
So you're quite right about that, and in a minute I will explain how we take account of that risk in
evaluating what the harvest rate should be. There are ways to take account of that.
Audience Member
Just to clarify, AFMA will collate what surveys have been done.
Audience Member
[1:02:26] and someone needs to put a sheet together [1:02:30] those surveys [1:02:32].
Jim Cavaye
And undertake to get back to you. Yes, there's one quick question.
Audience Member
Can I just clarify the definition around tier 3? What does the no recent survey mean? I mean,
tier 2 is survey older than five years. So where does – my understanding of tier 3 was 10 plus
years.
Tony Smith
Again, I'm not quite sure. I mean, for a number of stocks, say in the west, there have essentially
been no surveys or none that are relevant and so that's where a tier 3 would mostly apply, is if
there were no surveys and there was simply a fixed catch which is at a low level and thought to
be precautionary and that.
Audience Member
Yet there must be a line between tier 2 and tier 3, otherwise it's a grey area that you could apply
tier 2 [1:03:22].
Tony Smith
Nick?
Nick Rayns
Yeah, I'll just respond to that. You're right, that comes down to the competence of the scientist
who [1:03:26] data. By that, I mean how clear the surveys have been, when did they occur, how
often did they occur in the past, in terms of deciding where that line is drawn. We [1:03:39],
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AFMA seeks advice from the scientific community and say okay, what's your advice to us about
when and how we should transit from a tier 2 to a tier 3 or indeed a tier 1 into tier 2, across those
three tiers. So if the advice to us is that there is enough confidence in the robustness of the data
to stay at tier 2, we will. If the advice says no, it's too old and the information is insufficient then
that advice would be taken on board by AFMA [1:04:10] TACs.
Audience Member
So the data could be 20 years old, if you get confidence [1:04:15] from the scientific community,
tier 2 would be advised as opposed to tier 3?
Audience Member
That's true, yes. It could happen.
Tony Smith
In actual fact, in the evaluation we're doing currently, we're looking explicitly at how long it is safe
to stay at tier 2 before the chances of seriously depleting the stock get beyond some low, low
level.
Audience Member
I was going to say my understanding was tier 3 was 10 years that that was issued previously, but
[1:04:54].
Audience Member
Can I just very briefly follow up on that? What you're doing with the tiers is you're using the tiers
as an indicator of uncertainty. Now, obviously time since the last survey is one way you could do
that.
Is there any way you can also build in some kind of specific acknowledgement of
inter-annual variability in terms of that oceanographic [1:05:24] parameters?
Tony Smith
Not so much oceanographic, John but recognising the point that Evan made, both of your
observation has error and there's inter-annual variability in productivity essentially, and those are
the sorts of things that we take account of, but rather than take account of them each and every
year, it's not quite like doing a stock assessment and then applying the harvest rate. The harvest
rate is actually set for a period of time such that those sort of uncertainties would not result in an
unreasonable level of risk for the stock.
Audience Member
Okay. Thanks.
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Jim Cavaye
Tony?
Tony Smith
Okay. So at the moment, the current harvest strategy for tier 1 averages out at a 15% harvest
rate or exploitation rate. The way it's actually applied, I think is generally that it steps down from
20-10% over five years as the survey gets more distant into the past so that the average over the
period would be 15%. For tier 2 it's currently set at half the rate for tier 1, with a maximum
possible value of 5,000 tonnes, and then tier 3 is set at 500 tonnes. So these values were
determined previously by a study that's similar to the one that we've been doing recently. So it
was essentially a simulation study that built in these uncertainties and then looked at the risks of
applying different harvest rates. Yep?
Audience Member
tier 2, is that an average 7.5 or is it 7.5?
Tony Smith
It's set at 7.5, yeah.
Audience Member
Okay. [1:07:22] of tier 1.
Audience Member
It's a maximum of 7.5.
Audience Member
So there are discussions around whether it should be set at the maximum or…
Tony Smith
So in 2014/15 the harvest rate for all the eastern stocks and for the western blue mackerel stock
is at or below 7.5% so essentially those are all currently at tier 2. The harvest rate for western
redbait and western jack mackerel is capped at the 5,000 tonne limit for tier 2.
Audience Member
Sorry, [1:08:03]. In 14/15 harvest rates for all eastern stocks and for western blue mackerel
stock is at a maximum of 5,000 tonne. My understanding is that jack mackerel is 18,000 tonne.
Tony Smith.
No.
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Audience Member
Both eastern and western are [1:08:27]. There's two zones so you're combining the two.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Thanks Tony.
Tony Smith
So the review itself – so this current harvest strategy was adopted about five years ago, under
the Commonwealth Harvest Strategy Policy. That's the normal practice, to review these every
five years or so. So the project that I'm leading, that Tim participates in, was funded by the
FRDC and there's some contribution from CSIRO as well. The two objectives from this study,
which differ a little bit from similar ones that were undertaken prior to 2009, the difference is really
in the – well, to some extent, in the first objective; to provide advice on the best practice
reference points for four main target species. That has been designed deliberately to look at the
issue of the broader ecological impact that fishing these species have. So there's been quite a
lot of research done since that period when this current harvest strategy was brought in. I did
some work for the Marine Stewardship Council which looked at the sort of ecosystem effects of
harvesting these sort of species. There was a report done by Lenfest which came out in 2012.
So there's been quite a lot of focus on appropriate benchmarks or reference points for these sort
of fisheries. So we've done some more work specifically to look at that for this fishery, and then
secondly, we provided advice on suitable harvest rates to achieve the management objectives of
the four main target species.
So the way in which we looked at objective 1 was to use ecosystem models for the region, for
southern and eastern Australia. These models are of relatively recent origin, they've basically
developed over the last 15 years or so. There are some quite well developed models in this
region. Basically, it's a bookkeeping exercise to look at, you know, if you're harvesting these sort
of species here, what else is eating them and what's the impact of removing those, so harvesting,
on the rest of the ecosystem. So we've used in this case, a model called Atlantis to look at those
issues but in Tim's fishery in South Australia, I think he used a different model but a very similar
approach to look at what are the ecological impacts of fishing these species.
For the second objective, we used the more conventional single species models to test different
harvest strategies to see which ones best meet the management objectives, and that's both
achieving the targets but also avoiding the limits.
So that's where the issues about the
uncertainty and the assessments, the year to year variability in the stocks and so on, are taken
account of in the models that we then use to essentially test different harvest strategy. The
targets there are informed by the results from the first objective and the limits are specified in the
policy which says that there should be a less than a 10% chance of falling below a limit reference
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point, which is for most fisheries, the default is 20% of unfished biomass. So that's not a target,
the target's usually much higher, but you also want the low probability of the stock being depleted
heavily.
So the results for objective 1, and I'm not providing any technical detail here but the report will be
out very soon, we simulated different depletion levels for each stock and then all the stocks
together, and then we looked at how other species and groups changed in abundance due to the
effects of fishing the small pelagic species. So our basic finding was that there were in fact
minimal impacts on predators and other species in this particular ecosystem. That's consistent
with some previous work that we've done.
Basically, because we've also done this sort of
analysis in a lot of ecosystems around the world, what we've found is that some ecosystems are
particularly vulnerable to fishing these particular sorts of species and others are not, and so one
of the reasons perhaps that we find that there's not a lot of sensitivity in southern eastern
Australia is that none of the species that we looked at certainly rely entirely on feeding on these
small pelagic species and most of the predators seem to be opportunistic feeders, they eat
whatever is available. That's not too surprising because, as we've said a number of times, both
the abundance and the available of these species come and go, and so any predator that was
totally reliant on feeding on these species would be in for a hard time when the environmental
conditions or whatever were poor.
So from previous work, we get bigger impacts actually in southern and eastern Australia in
fishing krill – now there's fishery for krill at the moment but there are in other parts of the world –
but also there was fishing on mesopelagics, which are the sort of deep scattering layer lantern
fish, myctophids and so on. Both of those groups are in very high abundance in Australian
waters and unlike many small pelagic fisheries worldwide, ours is actually very small and also the
abundance of them is relatively low compared to the overall abundance of fish in the ecosystem.
So they simply don't constitute a large proportion of the ecosystem and so the sensitivities to
fishing them are lower for that reason.
For objective 2, we're just finalising the results here but we've looked at harvest rates that would
result in – well, we've looked at a number of different options but one that after some discussion
at the RAG we've looked at more closely, is trying to achieve a 50% chance of being above or
below the unfished biomass as a target for the fishery, and for each stock and species. So the
harvest rates vary across the species, and we saw before from Nick's slide that these species
live for different amounts of time and they're more or less productive. Remember, the default at
the moment is 15% harvest rate as a target. These results suggest you could increase that
harvest rate for blue mackerel and sardine but probably should be reduced somewhat for jack
mackerel and redbait, and that's not too surprising that jack mackerel and redbait are the longer
living species, they're less productive and so these are our findings so far at least.
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So we take account of the uncertainties, the probability of exceeding the lower limits could
possibly lower the values for blue mackerel and sardine slightly, and there's still a debate to be
had about whether the fishery actually wants to increase harvest rates on those anyway. The
tier 2 harvest rates, we're looking still at having those at half the tier 1 rates and the preliminary
results we've got for that suggests that that's okay for most of the species but for blue mackerel
that may be a bit too high. So again, we're sort of moving towards a more species specific
essentially management for the harvest rates. Yep?
Audience Member
For tier 2 harvest rate, you said it's likely to be at half the tier 1, but still maxing out at
5,000 tonne?
Tony Smith
That's still to be determined, I guess.
Audience Member
What we do is take the advice of the scientists to say we need to adjust the harvest rates for
various species up or down, and it depends on what the [1:17:49] stock size is coming out of
Tim's work as well for working out what that tonnage will be. So it's a combination of Tony's work
and Tim's work that will lead us to come up with a TAC for each of those species.
Audience Member
But the rules say that it's 7.5% or a maximum of 5,000 tonnes.
Audience Member
That's the current rule, but we've got some new scientific advice so we need to make sure that
those current rules still apply, and I think Tony's point is in fact for at least one of those species,
the blue mackerel, Tony mentioned, that may result in too high a TAC. So we'd be looking at
varying that rule to bring that TAC down on blue mackerel to make sure it wasn't a simple half or
a 5,000 tonne number, that it was adjusted to make sure it met with their science.
Audience Member
It's a maximum of 5,000 tonnes so it could be 1,000 tonne?
Audience Member
We're speculating until these two gentleman finish their work.
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Audience Member
I'm just trying to determine whether the 5,000 tonne has just been dropped off so tier 1
[1:18:49]…
Tony Smith
Nothing's being dropped at the moment, is the answer, this is still work in progress and there has
to be a debate essentially through the normal consultation mechanisms, through the RAG and
the MAC and so on.
Audience Member
[1:19:04], as I mentioned earlier, is to bring this group back together in January/February when
hopefully Tony's work will be finished by then and Tim's work will be more advanced, and we'll be
having more of those sort of discussions about what means in terms of changes to the harvest
strategy and what the actual tonnages might be recommended, will happen at that meeting. The
new season for this fishery starts [1:19:28] plenty of time to go [1:19:30] in January and February.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Thanks Tony.
Tony Smith
So last slide. So the next steps. The draft report, which should be available within weeks,
considered by the Resource Assessment Group. There'll be a technical review of the science
itself by FRDC and then advice would go out of the Resource Assessment Group to the
Management Advisory Committee and to AFMA. Okay. That's it.
Jim Cavaye
Thank you Tony. The questions are useful and I just wanted to ask if there are any more
questions? Yes?
Audience Member
It's interesting that you mentioned Lenfest because, of course, one of the big findings of that
group was that in fact, instead of using conventional [1:20:24] reference that in fact the forage
fish [1:20:28] should in fact be [1:20:31] that our levels should take a precautionary approach to
this. So have your models actually incorporated that?
Tony Smith
Well, as I explained, what we did was to look – so that was general advice for small pelagic
fisheries generally. What we found in the study I did, which actually ran parallel to the Lenfest
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work that was separate was that it may be more appropriate to determine for each ecosystem
and each fishery what the sensitivities are. So rather than…
Audience Member
So [1:21:16] taken that advice from Lenfest?
Tony Smith
Not directly, no.
Audience Member
I guess the crucial thing for recreational fishers is that in fact we target pelagic fish who are
primarily feeding on these schooling stocks of baitfish. Okay. So it's all very well for you to say
it's okay for us to take these and the fish will still survive because they're lantern fish but we can
can't target those pelagic fish eating lantern fish.
Audience Member
That's something that's not considered in [1:21:58].
Audience Member
Could I make another point? The last question was really related to looking at recreational
fishers as one of the predator groups for the SPF. Now, the recreational fishery is concentrated
in times…
Tony Smith
Sorry, the recreational fishery doesn't target these species.
Audience Member
Sorry, indirectly it targets their prey.
Tony Smith
Their predators?
Audience Member
Their predators, sorry. Does Atlantis, does the model Atlantis have spatial information about
predation of the Small Pelagic Fishery?
Tony Smith
It has some. It's a spatially resolved model, but the spatial resolution is relatively poor. So I think
in the whole of southern eastern Australia there was something like 80 different regions that were
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considered. So the answer is yes but it's not a suitable mechanism for dealing with the issues
that Nick talked about before which is the effects of localised depletion [1:23:19] consider that,
they're just looking more at a population level on the likely impacts of…
Audience Member
Would some of those 80 zones be concentrated for example around seal rookeries or bird
rookeries?
Audience Member
So what we've been talking about in terms of localised depletion is firstly to get the exploitation
rates conservative and right, then think about design rules, and then think about spatial and
temporal enclosures particularly around key central place forages but also potentially around key
recreational fishing zones. They're the sort of things that the RAG is considering. So really what
we're looking to you guys for advice from, is about how to deal with those issues. We're looking
at the exploitation rates and I think Tony – don't underestimate Tony's work, it'll be very useful for
you to look at, Evan. If I could, Tony's paper on science which was done in parallel to Lenfest is
a very important piece of work and so I think what Tony is recommendation is how to get the
exploitation rates right but that's not the whole package, the whole package is all of the other
things to do with stuff around like [1:24:46].
Jim Cavaye
Okay. I'm keen to keep us moving. Yes, Evan?
Audience Member
Well, I think we would like to have a look at that in some detail and I just wonder whether we can
have copies of that because there's parts of the ecosystem, for example birds, where it's hard to
see how those birds can change their predatory patterns from fish which are primarily schooling
on the surface to species which are largely bottom feeders and so that creates all sorts of issues
and how that then relates to the needs of those species in terms of abundance for crucial times
within, for example, their breeding seasons and [1:25:34].
Jim Cavaye
We'll go to Tony and then to Mark.
Tony Smith
I didn't mean to give the impression that everything is eating only krill and myctophids. In fact,
marine food chains are actually food webs and small fish are low in the – sorry, young fish are
low in the [1:25:56] and then rise as they get bigger. So it's actually much more complicated than
that. These models do try and take account of those ontogenetic sort of shifts in trophic level
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essential. The point is that if you look at the actual diets of most of the predators in these
systems they are very diverse, they are very variable over time and they are not largely reliant on
[1:26:27].
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Thanks. I'm going to move to Mark, then I'm going to go to Allan, then I'm going to go to
Nick.
Audience Member
My question was actually directly related to what you just said, Tony but I'll refer you back to you
report on the impacts of fishing low traffic where there's species on green ecosystems in 2011.
In it, you spoke to tuna and [1:26:44] and I quote, are the most valuable species. Blue fin tuna
eats both redbait and jack mackerel in high proportions by eating between 30% and 40%
respectively, and yellow fin tuna eats yellowtail scad, jack mackerel, blue mackerel and redbait.
The effect on these predators stops [1:27:04]. You mentioned in your presentation that the
impact of predators is consistent with previous work so what's changed? If it was unknown back
in 2011 and you're now saying it impacts…?
Tony Smith
So we did quite a lot of extra work for this study to – the model that we used for the 2011 study
was the Atlantis model, in particular was developed for the south east fishery, so [1:27:34]
fishery. It had a poor representation in fact of the small pelagic fish system, it was not focused
on that. Because we're now focused on this particular fishery, we did a lot more work to improve
the parameterisation of the small pelagic species in the system and to improve the representation
of some of their key predators such as penguins, for example. So the model is not the same. It's
the same model by name but it was re-parameterised.
Audience Member
So is the 30% to 45% still sort of…
Tony Smith
I would have to check that on the actual [1:28:20] but, as I said, it's quite variable.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Allan? We're going to go to Allan.
Audience Member
Can I just ask what sort of information there is in relation to the movement of predators? I think
this goes back to what John and Evan were starting to get at. Do we know much about the
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movement of predators? Because that will affect, I suppose, how we assess localised depletion
as well. It's not only what they ate.
Audience Member
[1:28:47].
Tony Smith
Again bearing in mind I'm not focusing on localised depletion, but in the model that we've used,
the one I've described here, the Atlantis model, we certainly model the movement of say the
southern blue fin tuna, the seasonal movements of those species, and likewise for the other tuna
species on the east coast, and for seabirds and other species where we have that information.
Audience Member
How complete is that sort of information?
Tony Smith
We never have complete information.
Audience Member
[1:29:23]. So it's not that complete?
Tony Smith
Well, it's the best information we have, put it that way, and we do try and take account of the
uncertainties in the analysis.
Jim Cavaye
So over to Nick. We're going to have a chance to discuss this in some detail so I'm just keen to
get all the questions of clarification out of the way, then it's over to you.
Audience Member
I was just going to make an offer to Evan.
I'm aware that there are some several good
references about the gut contents and things of SBT and as Tony, and I think Tim, might have
mentioned. So we're happy to provide those. My reading of them, for what it's worth, does show
that for SBT at least there's a chance in the diet depending on the age class of the fish, and that
varies being from somewhat reliant on small pelagics to not reliant, and it also depends on where
they are. Some studies show a high reliance in some parts of Australian waters, remembering
that these fish span the Java Sea, right round to New Zealand and right out to South Africa. So
it's not surprising that if you look at them overall, they have a very wide variety of food sources,
and as Tony has said, they are quite opportunistic in terms of what they're feeding on.
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Jim Cavaye
Okay. Thanks. Tim, do you want to say something?
Tim Ward
Just that we've done some similar work to Tony in South Australia. There were concerns similar
to the ones that you have including from the commercial tuna fishing right to the harvesting of
large quantities of sardines could mean for tuna movements, distribution, catchability. We've
done a very large study that had a modelling component which was similar to Tony's but using a
different model, but I think more importantly, had a really large field component where we went
out and looked at the diets, looked at the foraging areas, looked at the reproductive rates of
these species in and around the fishery, where this very large fishery from an Australian
perspective, was growing, and outside the fishery and explicitly looking for effects on their
reproductive biology or their distribution. We couldn't find any of those effects and absence of
evidence or evidence of absence we understand that, but a very detailed study of the key
predatory species, the ecological indicators for that system showed that they were all very
eclectic feeders, they fed on a whole range of different species, they didn't feed on a single
species of small pelagic fish.
They took a whole range of things and we could find no
measurable change in their reproductive success. So I think you need to take that body of work
that's been done into account when you're trying to evaluate what the implications are.
Jim Cavaye
So I'm keen for us to make the best use of our time here, and so what we're planning to do is
now move into an opportunity for you to have your input, and those questions are useful, they're
beneficial, they've been able to add value to a lot of the discussion this morning but now it's over
to you. We're keen to do two things. One is to get your input, as much input as you possibly can
give AFMA about the Small Pelagic Fishery and how it could be managed or should be
managed, and the way we're going to do that is to have a chance for you to raise the issues that
you still feel are important. So what I'm going to suggest to do, and this is a bit bossy, is for you
to split into little groups of three, maybe just gather up with some partners, and these are people
that you don't normally work with. So if you're from South Australia, unfortunately you might
need to link with a Queenslander, with all respect.
Audience Member
[1:33:08].
Jim Cavaye
Only joking, but I am keen for you to mix with people that you don't necessarily have a lot to do
with and I'll challenge you to come up with – if we can go to the next slide, if that's possible – I
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want to stimulate your thoughts with these two questions. What aspects of what you've heard
about the fishery and the management of the fishery and what you know about the fishery are
useful or at least represent some progress? You may not be entirely happy or satisfied but they
at least represent some progress. So what are some of the things that you think contribute to the
proper management of the fishery, and secondly, what are the issues that you still feel need to
be addressed, whether it's lack of data or some decision-making process, or whatever it might
be, what are the issues that you feel still need to be addressed?
Now in order for us to capture this and you'll come up with many, many issues I'm sure, but to be
a little bit like a school master, we have these dreaded post-it notes on your table here. So in
your little groups of three, I'm keen for you to talk over those two things there, and to list down,
one issue at a time on each separate post-it notes. So I'm keen for you to plaster the table with
post-it notes.
Some will be about what you find most useful or what you see as at least
representing progress and some post-it notes saying 'well, gee, this issue here hasn't been
addressed' or 'this is an issue that I think really needs more work' or some issue that you might
feel needs to be raised. Do you follow what I'm asking?
So you will have a combination of post-it notes on both these questions here and I'm keen for you
to come up with as many as you can. My advice is do not dwell, do not argue the toss, do not
have a United Nations debate about any particular issue, move on from it and make sure that you
capture as many of the issues as you can and plaster the table with post-it notes. Do you follow
what I'm asking?
So join up with two other people, form a little group of three, people that you don't necessarily
have a lot to do with and then start brainstorming some of these issues. Yes, Evan?
Audience Member
I guess there's a couple of things which probably need to be said and probably should have been
said at the start of the meeting, but one of the things is about the outcomes of this workshop, that
without the presence of environmental group here, I think necessarily any questions, queries and
things that come out are going to be deficient simply because the environmental groups aren't
here to give their particular perspective on this issue.
The second thing just goes to how this is actually organised and it's something that probably
stakeholder groups like recreational fishers need to talk to AFMA about but in fact, if you're going
to run a stakeholder forum, we would much prefer to have a much more collaborative approach
both in the timing, the set up and the organisation. For example, I asked whether we would be
able to give a presentation, and that was actually denied so we weren't able to give a
presentation this morning. So I think that needs to be put on record that in fact in the future this
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is not how we wish to engage, but in fact, we believe there's better models for engagement to
feedback and forum discussion.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. I'm going to go to Nick to give some explanation. Thank you.
Nick Rayns
Evan, I'll deal with the second one first. Very happy to get that feedback, and in terms of the next
forum we hold, we're very happy to get advice both from yourselves, as a collective group of
recreational fishers about how you might want to see that run but your earlier point about the
environmental groups, they chose not to be here. We can't force them to turn up. They too, if
they have problems with the format, are quite welcome to suggest to us a better format that might
suit their expectations. Bearing in mind, if we get both of you back together, it would be great if
there was some agreement between the two groups about what that format might look like as
well, rather than actually getting two separate views. So very open to considering alternative
format if you think that would improve the outcome, and in terms of the NGOs, we did invite
them. People were given six to seven weeks' notice in the original invite. We can't force people
to turn up if they don't want to be here.
Audience Member
I'm not keen of breaking up into groups of three. There are so few recreational fishermen here.
There is only one scientist who was historically critical, that's me. I think it would be much more
productive not to use the groups of three but to have the rec fishermen form a single group.
Jim Cavaye
It's entirely up to you. This is not trying to separate people out, it's just trying to find a way of
making sure we gather all the issues, and you have a chance to talk things over in a little bit of
time with some other folks but entirely up to you. Allan?
Audience Member
I'd just like to reiterate what Evan said too. This is the really the first time, when I walked in here
and sat down, that I got a real sense as to what you were wanting to do. I thought this was an
information session like we normally have with AFMA. The fact that we're breaking up into
groups and inputting and feeding back in was fairly new to me. I didn't know we were going to do
that. To be able to input in effectively giving presentations is all fine but I think we would have
probably liked to have known that that's was what we were expected to do because sometimes
we need to think about these things in relation to formulating our positions and ideas to feed back
to you. Now to do it in the same of a couple of hours is probably not ideal for us, particularly
when we didn't know that this is what was expected of us.
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Jim Cavaye
Okay. Nick, do you want to say something?
Nick Rayns
I'm not going to say anything other than thank you for the feedback. Happy to cop that one on
the chin if it wasn't clear, so thanks very much, Allan.
Jim Cavaye
Yes, Mark?
Audience Member
Could I ask a point of clarification? If we go through this exercise, my comment to the second
question up there is that's been given to the expert panel, that's been given to the relevant
minister, that's been given to [1:40:25] who is coordinating all of the SPF research program so in
some ways, I think it's a bit of a waste of time. If we are to go through this, I want to know what
hat I've got on so that when you get the information, it's clear to me who is giving that
information. Are you asking me to give [1:40:46]'s perspective on those two questions or are you
asking Mark [1:40:50] as a recreational fisher his perspective? So I think we need to clarify that
because I do not want any input that I have here to be misconstrued one way or the other. So I
would like that to be clarified.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. I'll get Nick to give an impression about that. I can give you my view as well.
Nick Rayns
Mark, I fully understand that the people in this room can't just come here and represent their
organisation on spec. So the comments expressed in this room will be from the individuals who
are in this room. As I said earlier, this is not the end of a process, this is AFMA engaging with
you at the beginning of the process to work through a number of issues that are of concern to
you.
Now, I'm aware of those issues that Colin Buxton and the expert panel and things are looking at,
and to be honest, they're great, a lot of them are focused on a whole range of things, as I said, at
our next gathering will be very, very useful to hear about but they don't cover everything. When it
comes down to the nuts and bolts of the socioeconomics of localised depletion issues, the matter
that was raised earlier about there needs to be enough bait fish out there that school up the fish
we're after so that we can catch what we want to. I don't see that being covered the work that
the expert panel is doing in a practical sense of what are the solutions on the water to those sort
of issues.
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Audience Member
Sorry, it may not be what they're working on, what I said was that's the input we've had into the
process and whether they agree with, disagree with it or use it, is a completely different issue. A
lot of the response that we got from the expert panel was that these sort of things were out of the
terms of reference for them so they couldn’t be considered, that they weren't actually tabled.
Nick Rayns
I guess I'm picking that up and saying here's a chance to go further than just consideration, that
let's look at some solutions to those issues.
Jim Cavaye
So my answer to your question is its entirely up to us in this room. We've got time together now
until 1.30 and the purpose of coming together is to really be part of further input into AFMA to
help in the management of the Small Pelagic Fishery. Now there's the expert panel, there's
previous issues that you've raised with them, there's submissions no doubt that you've put in, all
kinds of stuff has gone on. But it's going to take ongoing deliberation and input to make the best
decisions about this fishery. So in the time that we have together until 1.30, let's talk about
what's the best way that you would like to have input into AFMA in the context of all of the
engagement that's been going on and will go in the future. So my suggestion to you is we can sit
around in small groups and come up with ideas and then have a large group discussion, or we
can sit around as a large group here and talk through what you think are probably the most key
three, four, five key issues that you think need to be discussed further. What's your view about
how best to use your time? Yes?
Audience Member
Considering what we're used to, we really don't consider this a large group from what we have to
deal with normally, this is not a large group for us.
Audience Member
Can we have a break?
Jim Cavaye
Well, what I mean…
Audience Member
Can we have a break and think about that?
Jim Cavaye
Yes.
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Audience Member
Good idea.
Audience Member
[1:44:07].
Audience Member
What I would say is that we have five or 10 minutes break and have a chance to discuss.
Jim Cavaye
Okay. Do that. Let's have a 10 minute break. The loos, if you need them, are just out the door
and to the right, there's tea and coffee there, and let's come back at 12.05 and let's get your view
about the best way to have input into this time together today. Over to you.
[End of Transcript]
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