Commercial fishers believe that immediate action is required to improve the economic viability of the Moreton Bay Trawl Fishery (MBTF). Challenges relate to inefficiencies and resource utilisation, specifically (i) gear efficiency; (ii) harvest rules; (iii) fuel consumption; (iv) over-capitalisation; (v) seasonal closure effects on deployment of capital; (vi) harvesting for market demand; and (vii) environmental impacts of the fishery. In addition, the fishery is operating in a global environment of falling prawn prices and increasing fuel prices.

Exacerbating these challenges is the recent implementation of the Moreton Bay Marine Park Zoning Plan. In addition to loss of fishing grounds for conservation, the State Government’s Marine Park Structural Adjustment Package, which sought to remove active fishing licences from the Bay, failed to address effort displacement. This has led to reduced economic yield from fished areas and increased ecological impacts. The impacts to fishers include increased competition in open areas, higher steaming, social and labour costs, and market impact through targeting sub-optimal product. In summary, the ecological, social and economic costs to fishers have increased.

The rising costs of production have motivated fishers to address profitability. Harvest strategies aimed at optimising economic performance would help address these issues and potentially offer the MBTF greater resource security.

Implementation of harvest strategies may be improved by changing the regulatory framework of the fishery. This would provide benefits from a compliance, monitoring and reporting perspective. Currently, the 10 year review of the Queensland East Coast Trawl Fishery Management Plan is underway. Whilst the primary objective of the review is to update the Plan with respect to delivering the best long term economic benefits for society through effective and sustainable management of Queensland’s fisheries resources, it also provides an opportunity for regulatory change for improved harvest strategies in the MBTF

The Queensland East Coast Trawl Fishery Management Plan, was completed and introduced on 21st December, 2000, with the Management Plan’s Regulatory Impact Statement released October 2000. The plan sets performance criteria for a 40% reduction in bycatch and a 25% reduction in damage to benthos. Environment Australia also sets criteria on the sustainability of (1) target species, (2) retained bycatch (by-product), and (3) discarded bycatch species from trawl fisheries; a key factor of which is the total mortality on these species caused by the fishing operation. FRDC are currently funding QDPI research (FRDC#2000/170) to describe and quantify trawl bycatch in Queensland and the preliminary effects of bycatch reduction devices (BRDs) on the bycatch.

“Hoppers” are product-quality and cost-efficiency enhancement devices that are being progressively introduced into the South Australian, Western Australian, and Northern Prawn Fishery, and have been fitted by a small number of trawlers on the Queensland East Coast. These devices are recommended in the 1997 QCFO (QSIA) sponsored ISO Best Practice manual for onboard handling of prawn catch. Anecdotal reports suggest that these devices not only enhance product quality but significantly increase the survival of bycatch species that are caught by the trawl net (despite BRD’s), because the catch is dropped into a tank of fresh sea-water rather than onto a dry sorting-tray.

Therefore there is a need to pro-actively evaluate and document the effect of Hoppers on survival of discarded bycatch to ensure that the Queensland Prawn Trawl fleet gains maximum recognition for the “environmental credits” accrued as Hoppers are progressively introduced. This would provide an added bonus to a process already underway as a commercial evolution in trawl fisheries around Australia. Such information could also act as an environmental incentive, apart from the product quality and cost consideration, for trawler operators to fit Hoppers.

There is a particular need in the case of the smaller inshore boats involved in the Queensland East Coast banana fishery. Here there is considerable community pressure for inshore closures to cover local and tourist destination beaches, in response to discarded bycatch washing up after trawling operations. Appropriately sized non-mechanised Hoppers are currently under development but these will need to be independently evaluated to ensure that the community is satisfied that they will reduce bycatch mortality, ie no dead fish on politically sensitive beaches.

There is a need to assess how bycatch reduction devices (BRDs) are likely to affect the weight and composition of bycatch in the Queensland east coast trawl fishery (QECTF). Mandatory use of the devices has been recently implemented in some sectors and further measures are proposed.

There is a need to estimate and compare the weight and composition of bycatch with- and without-BRDs to assess recent and ongoing bycatch reduction initiatives that have been legislated in the Queensland Trawl Fishery Management Plan. Deploying observers or researchers appears to be the only robust approach for undertaking these comparisons.

Current estimates of the weight and composition of bycatch from the fishery operating without-BRDs are unknown for most sectors of the QECTF. These will have to be derived in order to facilitate any comparisons with estimates obtained when the fishery is operating with-BRDs.

There is also a need for the QECTF to consider the Criteria for Assessing Sustainability of Commercial Fisheries under the Wildlife Protection Act 1984 and the project makes some headway towards addressing these criteria.

This development will benefit both the fishing and aquaculture industry through a better utilisation of prawn waste. It will involve taking a generally discarded seafood waste and produce a value added product. It will aid the seafood processors by reducing the costly expense of disposing of processing waste, assist in waste management and potentially produce a new market for unwanted material. Presently only small quantities of prawn heads are utilised in further processing, being sold for little or no profit. Generally prawn heads are regarded as an expense to the processor. This expense is increasing as greater pressure is being placed on manufacturers with regards to the disposal of biological waste.

This project will allow manufacturers access to detailed technical information on the processing requirements for producing a prawn stock as well as the information on the export market and the domestic market potential. This project will allow processors to investigate an additional product to manufacture without the additional costs of product development.
The success of this project is aimed at generating interest in the utilisation of prawn waste into value added food products.

In order to establish stock status, supply accurate advice and recommendations on management and monitor effectiveness of management intervention if need be, there is a need to develop procedures which

a) allow definition of the relationship between parent stock and recruitment levels in commercial prawn species, using fishery independant surveys as a means of determining recruitment levels

b) determine the status of these species and evaluate the potential risk of overfishing

c) develop methods which can used to evaluate the effectiveness of management intervention, if and when such intervention occurs.