SCRFA update May 2007

Although progress on the effective implementation of spawning aggregation management, with few exceptions, is proving elusive, awareness is growing and continues to be a major focus of SCRFA's activities. Newly, we have joined the ICRI family, collaborate with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, a forum covering 22 Pacific island nations, and have joined forces with a bilingual Weblog, coordinated by Alfonso Aguilar (more below). We are also planning, by request, a second coral reef fish workshop in Fiji, to take place in July 2007 in Suva; a report of last July's workshop is on our website.These initiatives not only focus on aggregations but at the same time seek to encompass many broader aspects of coastal fisheries and related issues of information collection and dissemination. As a example of the latter, we are conducting a public consultation on data sensitivity. Through this, we plan to assemble a set of guidelines that can assist workers in balancing the risks and ethics of collecting and releasing details on spawningaggregation location data and proprietary information gained from fishers, against the need for ready access to spatial information for conservation planning.

We were again reminded of the significance of the aggregating habit by the outcomes of a recent workshop, held in February in Hong Kong, to complete the IUCN red-listing of all groupers (Epinephelinae). Of 161 species, 20% are now listed as ‘Threatened' with a further 19% ‘Near-threatened' (http://www.hku.hk/ecology/GroupersWrasses/iucnsg/index.html - see ‘Species' section) . These species tend to be the larger groupers, many of them threatened by aggregation fishing. Press coverage for the workshop attracted welcome attention to the need to manage these fishes. Particularly worrying, the Nassau grouper, Epinephelus striatus, continues its decline in the Caribbean, despite management initiatives on aggregations in Belize, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas. Such is the concern that at the last meeting of the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute in Belize, November 2007, a large group of workers on this species had an impromptu gathering. Convened by the Caribbean Fishery Management Council and lasting an unexpected 4 hours, this side-meeting strongly reaffirmed the need for more action. There are calls for a complete moratorium in Belize.

Yvonne Sadovy (University of Hong Kong)
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Director, SCRFA