Project Search

Abalone Viral Ganglioneuritis (AVG) disease is caused by a herpesvirus (infection with abalone herpesvirus, AbHV) and was first detected in Victoria in December 2005. The last recorded instance of this disease in Victoria was in January 2010 at Cape Otway.

The disease was again confirmed in the Cape Nelson area on 2 May 2021. Since then, further detections have been made at several locations and has been confirmed in Victoria as far east as Cape Otway and as far west as the Discovery Bay Marine Park.

While the virus is active there is a need for the Victorian wild catch abalone fishers to urgently review past research, to inform a gap analysis and further research.

This review will support those involved in the outbreak and inform fellow members nationally with a summary of past research and a way forward with other research for up-to-date biosecurity protocols, surveillance, and diagnostic tools to aid rapid detection to future proof the industry. Relevant industry, government representatives and stakeholders will be kept informed and asked to comment and contribute issues and ideas for a cooperative structured way forward to build a common framework on which to establish a set of key actions and or priorities. At the end of a staged process a workshop will be organised to evaluate and reassess research needs, assess and implement research findings and if further gaps are identified develop a framework to action.

Objectives

1. Conduct an analysis of past research on AVG, create a plain English summary and identify knowledge and research gaps that can be evaluated nationally by key stakeholders

2. Hold a workshop that will be a mixture of face to face and virtual so that key stakeholders can attend and participate in evaluation of suggested research projects identified

3. Prepare and provide a final report that clearly articulates research priorities for AVG in the short term and long term

Workshop

ISBN: 978-0-6455081-0-9

Authors: Craig Fox Harry Peeters Ian Knuckey Helen Burvill

Workshop • 2022-07-01 • 1.03 MB

2021-076-DLD.pdf

Summary

Following Abalone Viral Ganglioneurits (AVG) re-emerging in the Western Zone of the Victorian Abalone Fishery in early May 2021 it was decided that a workshop needed to be convened as soon as possible with relevant stakeholders to evaluate past research and understand research gaps while the virus is active, and samples of active material can be collected and stored in a secure laboratory in readiness for future testing. Stakeholders from wild catch Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and New South Wales; farmed abalone sector; government and research agencies and universities gathered for a 1-day workshop, held in Queenscliff on 14th December 2021 to identify and prioritise future research and development priorities.

Analysis of historical sea urchin research for improved management of nearshore fisheries in New South Wales

Project number: 2021-060

Project Status:

Current

Budget expenditure: $107,000.00

Principal Investigator: Neil Andrew

Organisation: University of Wollongong

Project start/end date: 31 May 2022 - 31 Mar 2023

Contact:

FRDC

TAGS

SPECIES

Need

The creation, persistence, and demise of sea urchin barrens is the most significant ecological dynamic on southeast Australian rocky reefs. Sea urchin barrens cover ca. 50% of nearshore reefs in NSW and have rapidly grown in Tasmania and far eastern Victoria. The creation and/or persistence of barrens has devastating impacts on a range of commercial and recreational fisheries, most notably abalone.

Managing fisheries to deliver societal benefits within the ecological regime driven by sea urchins presents a profound challenge. Dynamics external to the fishery are very influential and challenge classical fisheries governance paradigms. Overlayed on these ecological challenges are diverse stakeholders that have different visions for nearshore reefs and therefore the definitions of success.

New management objectives will be required, some of which will mean manipulating ecosystems and human behaviours to avoid thresholds in ecological variables in, among other species, sea urchin abundance, rather than optimizing yields in a classical fisheries sense. New institutional relationships will be required among policy makers, Indigenous groups, conservationists, and the fishing industry as they grapple with potential alternative futures for these reefs.

Considerable momentum is emerging in NSW to engage with this wicked problem. A unique opportunity exists to re-imagine the management of NSW reefs; to design a management regime in which all stakeholders have a place at the table. Fundamental to developing common purpose among diverse stakeholders will be a shared and scientifically informed understanding of the underlying ecology of reefs. This understanding will enable and promote the design for a spatial regime that serves multiple management and cultural objectives.

Achieving that shared understanding is hampered by the unavailability of scientific studies of the fisheries and ecology of sea urchins in southeast Australia. There is an urgent need to bring the comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of Centrostephanus on NSW reefs and relevance to fisheries (abalone, sea urchins) into the public domain to contribute more effectively to management.

Objectives

1. Analyse historical unpublished data on the ecology of Centrostephanus and its interactions with nearshore biota and augment the findings with oral histories of fishers to inform desirable outcomes for nearshore reef management

2. Submit research findings in the primary scientific literature as five papers and share findings with the primary nearshore reef stakeholders in the form of an accessible synthesis of all research findings.

3. Share findings and conclusions with key stakeholders from NSW, Victoria and Tasmania.

Investigating the use of a remote operated underwater vehicle (ROUV) for surveying abalone on reefs in the Western zone abalone fishery, Victoria.

Project number: 2020-125

Project Status:

Current

Budget expenditure: $160,000.00

Principal Investigator: Harry F. Peeters

Organisation: Western Abalone Divers Association (WADA)

Project start/end date: 3 Jun 2021 - 21 Feb 2022

Contact:

FRDC

TAGS

Rac Vic

Biosecurity

Avg

Artificial Intelligence

SPECIES

Blacklip Abalone

Greenlip Abalone

Need

Provide a tactical and strategic response to the recent outbreak. Develop a cost effective assessment tool to validate the spread of the virus and build a long term mechanism to undertake fisheries independent surveys.

Objectives

1. To validate a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROUV) survey tool

2. Assess options to integrate video from ROUV technology and other sources with existing diver data to develop fisheries independent surveys

3. To validate non surveyed abalone populations

PROJECT NUMBER • 2020-119

PROJECT STATUS:

CURRENT

New Opportunities For Abalone Processing Waste

ORGANISATION:

Curtin University

SPECIES

Indicators for density and biomass of exploitable abalone – developing and applying a new approach

Project number: 2020-065

Project Status:

Current

Budget expenditure: $147,900.00

Principal Investigator: Keith Sainsbury

Organisation: Western Abalone Divers Association (WADA)

Project start/end date: 30 Nov 2020 - 30 May 2022

Contact:

FRDC

TAGS

Survey

Stock Assessment

Resource Access And Allocation

SPECIES

Need

Most jurisdictions have developed and used various combinations of indicators in stock assessment and TAC setting of their abalone fishery. Applications often use a time series of commercial catch rate or FIS density to detect trends and identify reference points of stock status. The use of fishery dependent indicators from logbooks and GPS loggers have been criticized for their potential to be biased and insensitive (‘hyper-stable’) because of commercial selection of all observations that are made. As a consequence, Fishery Independent Surveys (FIS) have also been used in stock assessment, with varying coverage in all state’s abalone fisheries. However, FIS have also been criticized for their large cost and considerable uncertainty about how representative and useful the data is for intensely spatially-structured abalone fisheries (e.g. spatial mismatch of the FIS and the stock). FIS reviews in several states found variable relationships between FIS estimates and other indicators of the fishery.

Alternatively, both GPS loggers and FIS have considerable complementary strengths. GPS logger information has strengths of extensive fine-scale detail about catch (e.g. allowing spatial standardisation, that represents one of the main challenges to fishery dependent data) with good coverage of the fishery, while FIS have strengths of repeatable and local scale detail that is independent of the fishery.

The project will review data available from GPS loggers, catch records and FIS in WZ Victoria, with possible extension to other fisheries depending on data access and funding. Methods to calculate density and biomass from different sources of data will be consolidated and applied at different spatial scales, and the precision and statistical coherence of estimates compared. These comparisons will enable the development of criteria to improve design of FIS, logger programs and related observations, and recommendations and guidance on the use of indicators of legal density and biomass in fishery harvest strategies.

Objectives

1. Use the Victorian Western Zone (and other fisheries data, where available) as a test-bed to develop and evaluate a new approach to calculating density and biomass indicators of exploitable abalone.

2. Consolidate methods to calculate indicators of local exploitable density from reported catch, GPS logger and fixed site survey observations.

3. Assess the consistency, accuracy and reliability of these new indicators, and their likely performance for management decisions

4. Develop and apply new methods to (i) calibrate logger-derived local density from overlap of local observations of loggers and surveys, (ii) use logger observations to estimate the area fished and to which the calibrated local density estimates could be extrapolated to apply, and (iii) combine the density and area estimates to give an index of exploitable biomass in the fished area.

5. Provide criteria for the design of surveys, logger programs and related observations (e.g. the spatial scale of catch reporting) to give calibrated logger density and biomass indicators.

6. Provide recommendations and guidance on the use of indicators of exploitable density and biomass in fishery harvest strategies.

7. Provide training to develop capacity to understand and implement the approach with logger data.

Report

Authors: Keith Sainsbury Duncan Worthington and Bill Venables

Report • 2023-05-10 • 2.69 MB

2020-065 interim progress report.pdf

Summary

The objectives of this project are to use the Victorian Western Zone (WZ) abalone fishery to develop and evaluate a new approach to calculating abalone density and biomass indicators from the combination of three information sources. The three information sources are:
i. Logbook reported catch and effort,
ii. Global Positioning System (GPS) logger records plus depth and catch from fishers, and
iii. Fishery Independent Survey (FIS) observations collected by the government Victoria Fisheries Authority (VFA) and surveys done by the Western Abalone Divers Association (WADA).

This document provides a update on project progress to date, which has been mostly on reconciling the input data and replicating the analyses that were done historically to recommend a Total Allowable Commercial Catch (TACC) for the fishery.