Fisheries Newsletter No 131 (January-April 2010)

We open this issue with a short update of SPC’s Oceanic Fisheries Programme on advances in fisheries science for the “discrete stock”, as the authors put it, of South Pacific albacore. Discrete but essential for some domestic tuna fisheries of the region, such as those of American Samoa, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Samoa and Tonga, this stock had been little studied before.

The deepwater bottomfish fisheries held very good promise in the late 1970s but, 30 years down the track, very few countries in Oceania still have rising or stable catches. Nevertheless, there has recenly been renewed interest in this fishery and Mike McCoy was contracted to assess the management schemes currently in place in the region and try to understand the reasons “why some deepwater bottomfish fisheries have ceased and others have continued”.

You will also read here about: light-cast sportfishing and the ornamental trade in Kiribati and the Cook Islands (if you ever question SPC staff’s taste for missions in these places, check out the picture below...); a real breakthrough in the Monkey River prawn aquaculture experiments at USP; a type of hook that was used hundreds of years ago and seems to reduce the catch of non-targeted species today, and more. Enjoy. 

Aymeric Desurmont

Fisheries Information Officer