14 - SCRFA Update

Once again I am in Fiji working on a project we have been doing with the Fiji Fishery Research Office on a spawning aggregation located in a small marine protected area (MPA) off the island of Kadavu, south of Fiji’s capital, Suva. I have just learned that several of the fish we tagged in the Naiqoro Channel in July/August 2009 have been recaptured, and was fortunate to meet the fisher who caught them (see photo). Fiji is one of our focal study areas and we have been working here since the early 2000s, conducting fisher interviews and field work. At Naiqoro passage we are doing a baseline survey of the grouper aggregation site, one of the best known in Fiji.

Our other focal area currently is Palau, where we have just finished 18 months of field studies in an MPA in Ebiil Channel building on our initial work doing fisher interviews in 2003[http://www.scrfa.org/index.php/ case-studies/palau.html]. We have been working with the Palau Conservation Society on educational projects related to the field study. Looking back over these and other projects and our 10-year engagement with aggregation conservation and management, important lessons learned are that building long-term personal links and relationships is very important for being effective, and that there is still a real need to focus strongly on reef fish fisheries as a whole, while fostering an understanding of the role of aggregations within them. With this in mind, SCRFA is currently producing a film on Palau's coastal fishery and is also part of a newly formed fishery/MPA working group within ICRI (International Coral Reef Initiative), following a meeting in Monaco earlier this year. At this meeting it was very clear that much more attention is needed for coastal reef fishery management in general, over and above the protection of the coral reef habitats themselves and the use of MPAs. We will follow up on this at the next ICRI meeting in November this year in Samoa. Finally, I would like to draw your attention to our Blog on the SCRFA website, [http://fishspawning.wordpress.com/]. Please check this from time to time and consider commenting on issues of interest to you - there is much we can learn from exchanging information with each other as interest in marine issues rapidly grows.

Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson
Director, SCRFA
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