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This project will address the strategic challenge of identifying additional resources for the WCDSCMF. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, export markets in China closed, rendering the highly valued crystal crab fishery uneconomical. When the markets again opened within China and demand grew, the logistics of moving live crab to China became the next hurdle for the fishery due to a lack of air space and the related high cost of transport. Logistics remained difficult for all of 2020 and into 2021. Although fishers are now again able to sell their catch within this premium market, they have started to experience a cost squeeze, with rising costs associated with bait, salaries and their main input, diesel fuel. This fishery necessitates steaming large distances from port to the fishing grounds over expansive areas that they do not fish. If additional fishing gear could be deployed when traversing these distances, the fishery has the opportunity to expand its revenue with little increases in costs.
Using several different pots that have been successful around Australia and the world, this study will deploy these across a minimum of four latitudes along the west coast (additional latitudes added based on vessel behaviour) encompassed by the WCDSCMF. Across these latitudes, we will target 9 depth categories, starting at 150M to 1000M. Additionally, cameras and Conductivity Temperature and Depth (CTDs) loggers will be attached to the pots to analyse the species present, habitat and water chemistry, which allows better prediction of species associations. In doing this, this project will explore and identify possible viable commercial species that the WCDSCMF can include in their landings.

Objectives

1. Identification of potential new marine crustacean resources located within the water of the WCDSCMF.

2. Document associations between all marine crustacean species and their habitat within the grounds of the WCDSCMF to identify potential un-fished marine resources.

3. Trial modified traps designed to catch potential new crustacean stocks.

Giant Crab Enhanced Data Collection - Innovative approaches to enhance data collection in the Victorian, South Australian and Tasmanian Giant crab fisheries

Project number: 2019-114

Project Status:

Current

Budget expenditure: $325,241.00

Principal Investigator: Ewan Flanagan

Organisation: Victorian Fisheries Authority (VFA) Queenscliff

Project start/end date: 27 Jan 2021 - 30 Aug 2024

Contact:

FRDC

TAGS

SPECIES

Need

Giant Crabs are a long, lived, slow reproducing xanthoid crab distributed from southern Western Australia to central New South Wales that are considered to be a single stock across southern Australia.

The giant crab fishery (GCF) across southern Australia has a small tonnage of large, individually valuable animals. Despite the implementation of harvest strategies and management plans guiding the setting of conservative TACC’s, declining trends are evident across the shared Southern Australian resource.

The fishery has had ongoing problems collecting quality stock assessment data, leading to uncertainty in the assessment and management. Owing to the size of the fishery, and the remote nature of the fishing operations, assessments now rely on fisher dependant catch rate data with an inherent high level of volatility due to the small number of operators.

Attempts to improve the collection of fishery data over the years have been challenging, in particular for fisher-based collection of length-frequency data from volunteer measuring programs.

Innovative data collection methods for small scale fisheries such as the GCF are required to improve the monitoring of stock status of this important commercial fishery and enhance long-term sustainability of the Giant Crab resource.

A length based model has previously been developed and was designed to integrate assessments across the jurisdictions. The model for giant crab and was being used for South Australia and Tasmania but was not applied to Victoria due to data limitations. In recent years the modelling has discontinued in SA and Tas because of insufficient length frequency data, which compounded uncertainty present due to weak growth data. The lack of length data in previous years was the critical change that has forced the model to be discontinued.
So our ability to understand changes in the stock has become weakest at precisely the period in the history of the fishery when information is most needed. This project is designed specifically in response to this need to address the lack of data through development of an efficient method to collect LF information, with minimal burden on fishers to improve accuracy of stock assessments.

Objectives

1. Develop effective low-cost data collection method specific to Giant Crab

2. Trial and refine new data collection method

3. Analysis of fishery-independent biological data and investigation of usability to enhance assessment of Victorian, Tasmanian and South Australian giant crab fisheries