SCRFA update Dec 2009

Since Newsletter 12 in May, we have been extremely busy, particularly in the field but also in further developing educational materials. We have been participating in meetings and projects, ranging from scientific presentations and workshops to modeling the value of aggregating fish to the overall fishery. One major effort has been the upgrading of our website which we are pleased to release at the time of this Newsletter. We welcome feedback on additional materials or information that could be made available on the website. Note also the facelift on our twinned website in Spanish, cared for by Alfonso Aguilar-Perera in Mexico.

Field studies were conducted in Fiji and Palau, where we work with the Fiji Fisheries Research Division and the Palau Conservation Society (PCS), respectively. In Palau, which I will report on in more detail in the next Newsletter since we will wind up the project early in 2010, we have been working on a well-known spawning site in a protected area. Specifically, our task was to enhance the existing monitoring programme for one year to then be able to design a simple and practical scientific protocol for reduced sampling in future. We now have a very good understanding of the site, total fish numbers and distribution of the different species, as well as the temporal patterns. With these we can design a sub-sampling methodology and will model the relative contribution of this site to the fishery. This will provide an indication of the importance of this site to the national interest. In Fiji, we are working in another marine protected area. We were joined by fish tagging experts Rick Nemeth (University of the US Virgin Islands) and Michael Domeier (Marine Conservation Science Institute, USA). For the Nassau grouper in the Bahamas, we are working with a fishery scientist and local groups, as well as the Fisheries Department to determine the value of protecting aggregations by looking at their contribution to non-aggregation fishing. This kind of question is important to better understand the tangible benefits of protecting aggregations.

We held two workshops, one in May in the Philippines, the other in October in Fiji; both workshops included practical hands-on experience and lectures. In the Philippines, we worked with WWF-Philippines to train fishery officers, researchers and NGO workers on basic biological and fishery techniques for managing the live reef food fish fishery, especially the coral trout, Plectropomus leopardus. In Fiji, SCRFA joined with the Secretariat of the South Pacific (SPC) to conduct a workshop on the identification, monitoring and management of aggregations. Both of these workshops clearly highlighted a need for the development of simple guidelines for collecting basic fishery-related information (such as size of sexual maturation, species diversity, spawning season) and, as a result, I am developing a document to address this need. SPC is producing a film on aggregations that will incorporate the workshop.

We continue our strong focus on education materials and in outreach in general. Our English language Manager's Handbook was translated by Alfonso Aguilar-Perera (Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, Mexico) into Spanish and is being distributed by Brad Erisman (Scripps, USA) as part of his group's work on aggregations; apparently it has been very well-received. With PCS we have developed a range of educational materials, from Palauan/English fliers to posters, bumper stickers, life cycles and modules for children. We continue to contribute to newspaper articles and to management planning.

Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson
Director, SCRFA
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