Since about the year 2000 there have been very low catches in the Weipa Region of the Northern Prawn Fishery (NPF); these low catches were different to other areas of the NPF where they continued to fluctuate around long-term means and continued to fall within predicted levels. Industry and managers...
This project investigated the extent to which trawled communities of Australia’s North-West Shelf have recovered from high levels of trawling before the exclusion of foreign fleets in 1990 and after the imposition of tight controls on trawl and trap fishing in the early 1990s. The results...
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...
In Australia many stock assessments are dependent upon catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) to act as an index of relative abundance of fished stocks through time. But CPUE trends can be affected by many factors other than just stock size changes. Around Australia, and internationally, numerous and...
The more that is understood about the factors controlling the abundance of an exploited fish stock, the more optimally it can be harvested for sustainable yield and profit. It has been known for some time that catches of western rock lobster are closely related to the number of larvae surviving...