The fishery for red-legged banana prawns in the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf (JBG) developed in the early 1980s. Since then, fishing effort has varied from 700 to 2600 boat-days per year and catches range from 200 to 1000 tonnes per year. Initially the JBG fishery developed as an alternative to fishing in...

The project was developed in consultation with the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and State/Territory fisheries agencies. The idea of a publicly available set of standards or guidelines for marine fishery management agencies has been under discussion within fisheries agencies for some...

In the mid to late 1980s NORMAC began to suspect that tiger prawn spawning stocks in the NPF may have been reduced by fishing to levels that reduced recruitment to the fishery. A vessel buy-back scheme and other effort reductions were introduced to reverse this trend but, by the mid-1990s, the...