6 results

Exploring new resources for the West Coast Deep Sea Crustacean Managed Fishery in Western Australia

Project number: 2024-009
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $278,047.00
Principal Investigator: Simon de Lestang
Organisation: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) Hillarys
Project start/end date: 30 Nov 2024 - 30 Nov 2026
Contact:
FRDC

Need

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.

Novel fishery independent, biological and economic-processing methods to underpin expansion of Australia's fastest growing fishery, the Western Rock Octopus

Project number: 2023-052
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $650,260.00
Principal Investigator: Lachlan Strain
Organisation: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) Hillarys
Project start/end date: 31 Aug 2024 - 30 Aug 2026
Contact:
FRDC
SPECIES

Need

The Western Rock Octopus fishery has become Australia’s fastest growing fishery, with a 5-year average growth of 50% per annum between 2017 and 2022. Despite this expansion, there are still significant gaps in knowledge and practice that do not allow this fishery to grow and develop in an optimum sustainable and socio-economic manner. This project will fill the information gaps and develop pro-active management and economic policy settings that facilitate a comprehensive development of the fishery to its natural capacity. It meets FRDCs two main outcomes of the 2020-2025 R&D plan; growth for enduring prosperity, best practices and production systems, and also meets Enabling Strategy IV: Building capacity and capability.

Objectives

1. Quantify species mix, growth, population connectivity, and reproduction of the unexplored South Coast and deep-water West Coast stocks of Octopus djinda.
2. Develop and test an octopus trap mounted camera system as fishery independent survey tool for density, bycatch, habitat, and environmental data.
3. Develop a bioeconomic model for octopus fishery management and expansion in Australia.

Exploring changes in recreational fishing participation and catch due to COVID-19 – A WA case study

Project number: 2022-001
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $360,000.00
Principal Investigator: Karina Ryan
Organisation: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) Hillarys
Project start/end date: 30 Jun 2022 - 29 Jun 2024
Contact:
FRDC

Need

Robust data is critical to ensure sustainability and demonstrate the social and economic benefits of recreational fisheries. Traditional data collection methods can be cost-prohibitive, especially for fisheries operating across large scales, or those requiring real time information. Challenges associated with data collection have been highlighted during COVID-19, where travel restrictions have changed the dynamics of regional tourism and associated recreational fishing. Increased domestic travel is delivering economic benefits to many regional locations, however, there have been concerns about increased effort and the longer-term impact of increased catches on stock sustainability.

Federal and State Governments have implemented a range of policy responses during COVID-19, with support measures and stimulus packages for businesses, including tourism. Many jurisdictions have implemented measures to assist commercial and recreational fishing sectors, while few jurisdictions have implemented changes to recreational fishing regulations. In Western Australia, recreational fishing rules were revised to address sustainability concerns for valuable stocks of demersal finfish. This policy shift was supported by evidence from ongoing monitoring and stakeholder engagement. Further reviews will be conducted following the current state-wide survey (September 2020–August 2021), which will provide estimates of participation, effort, catch and expenditure in regional Western Australia attributed to local and non-local residents and to recreational fishing.

While intensive survey methods are repeated periodically, the adoption of indicators between these intervals can inform ongoing assessments. Social and economic indicators, such as those obtained from administrative data or record of sales, have the potential to provide rapid assessment of changes in participation, fisher demographics and catches. While benchmarking these data against traditional surveys may be required, there is a need to investigate a range of data sources that could measure change and inform rapid assessments.

Objectives

1. Investigate community indicators that could inform sustainability and policy objectives and a performance assessment framework for recreational fisheries in Western Australia.
2. Assess attitudes among stakeholders regarding perceived confidence in social and economic indicators for recreational fisheries based on case study.
3. Assess the impacts on recreational fishing associated with COVID-19 using the agreed performance assessment framework (and case study).
4. Provide recommendations for future collection of social and economic indicators to inform sustainability and policy objectives for recreational fisheries in Western Australia.

Whale entanglement mitigation program – understanding whale population dynamics, entanglement dynamics and gear modifications to reduce entanglements in WRL gear

Project number: 2021-091
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $750,000.00
Principal Investigator: Jason How
Organisation: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) Hillarys
Project start/end date: 31 Mar 2022 - 31 Mar 2025
Contact:
FRDC

Need

Whale entanglement in fishing gear has posed a major threat to the Western Rock Lobster (WRL) industry over the last decade. Adverse media attention has to date been avoided, but 2020 saw the first entangled whale appear dead on a WA beach entangled with gear from the state's fisheries. Similarly, several "public" rescues were undertaken of entangled whales which is extremely dangerous. Attempts to disentangle whales has led to the death of responders previously in both Canada and New Zealand. Such events have the capacity to provide a significant threat to the activities of the WRL industry through erosion of their social license.
A program to direct entanglement mitigation research over the next four years will increase the strategic focus of research and increase the efficiency of the application and granting process, thus leading to a more rapid implementation of outcomes into the management of the fishery. Critically, broad dissemination of the outcomes of these project will assist in creating a more resilient social license. This will be important when adverse media attention is focused on the industry as the result of either the death of a whale or responder attempting to disentangle the whale.

Objectives

1. Understand the inter-annual shifts in the humpback whale migration along the WA coast
2. Determine the dynamics and WRL gear involved in humpback whale entanglements
3. Determine the population size of the Western Australian (Stock D) humpback whale population.
4. Investigate novel mitigation measures to minimise entanglements in WRL gear.
5. Support WRL gear disentanglement operators through provision of equipment and new technologies.
Environment

Developing an independent shallow-water survey for the Western Rock Lobster Fishery: tracking pre-recruitment abundance and habitat change

Project number: 2019-159
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $445,500.00
Principal Investigator: Simon de Lestang
Organisation: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) Hillarys
Project start/end date: 30 Apr 2020 - 30 May 2023
Contact:
FRDC

Need

The current method of measuring undersize lobster abundance (PRA) is based on catch data adjusted for multiple biases inherent in commercial monitoring, namely: water depth, water temperature, swell, fisher experience, pot type, escape gaps, pot pulling time, month and location. Biases are exacerbated by recent poor sample sizes, as many fishers choose not to fish in shallow-water areas. Developing a standardized, repeatable survey in shallow areas will provide an improved index of PRA that can be incorporated into the stock modelling: this would improve the overall assessment.
Currently fishery-independent survey data collection requires a minimum of two staff to process the catch and record information. Data entry is conducted by a third staff member. To increase cost effectiveness (for this and other lobster surveys), a more efficient data collection system is needed. Initial scoping has identified a number of possible solutions (e.g. app-based entry). This project will expand on this original scoping work to develop a solution. This will also benefit commercial lobster monitoring work conducted by DPIRD as well as a range of other surveys in similar pot based fisheries.
This survey will also provide a platform for monitoring inshore WRL habitats. This will establish a baseline against which further research into the relationships between WRL and their near shore habitats can be undertaken. This will assist with detecting and quantifying habitat shifts that may impact the fishery. For example, there is anecdotal evidence that the heatwave temporarily modified some of these near shore habitats, leading to the altered relationship between puerulus and lobster recruitment. Long-term monitoring of juvenile habitats will likely provide a useful indicator of one of the factors affecting recruitment to the fishery.

Objectives

1. Produce accurate measures of pre-recruit abundance throughout the West Coast Rock Lobster Managed Fishery. Compare with commercial monitoring undersize lobster abundance and puerulus settlement data.
2. Design and construct a more efficient data recording tool to increase the accuracy and speed of data collection.
3. Develop base-line habitat descriptions at all potting locations throughout the shallow water survey.
4. Determine the relationship between sampling rate required to detect different magnitudes of marine habitat change at these survey locations
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