Developing a comprehensive understanding of the movement patterns and stock structure of a fish species is crucial for identifying the appropriate scale and strategy for management.

In south eastern Australia, there are several adjacent Snapper fisheries operating in South Australian (SA), Victorian and Commonwealth waters that are managed using different strategies. The SA fishery, currently Australia’s largest Snapper fishery, is divided into contiguous regions whose relative contributions to total catch have changed dramatically in recent years. The extent to which these different regional or jurisdictional populations represent a single or multiple stocks is poorly understood because of the limited understanding of the patterns of fish movement. For example, have the recent high catches of Snapper from Northern Gulf St. Vincent and South East resulted from high levels of biomass built up through local demographic processes or have fish moved in from adjacent regions or possibly even from Victorian or Commonwealth waters? If large-scale movement is involved, it must be temporally complex as it appears to not conform to a regular, annual pattern. The need here is to elucidate the regions of origin and movement patterns of fish that currently contribute to high regional catches in SA to inform about the demographic processes that drive the spatial and temporal variation in fishery productivity. This will point to the appropriate spatial scale for management. It would also provide insight for resource allocation amongst the different fisheries, which is currently being considered by AFMF to improve resource sharing arrangements for Snapper.

A project to inform fisheries adaptation to climate change is needed in the South East region because:
1) it is an international ‘hotspot’ for marine climate change, which is currently displaying signs of perturbation and where further shifts, shrinkages and expansions of ecosystems and species distributions are expected;
2) it produces >50% of Australia’s seafood and is home to 60% of the Australian population;
3) a formal risk assessment identified fisheries species at highest risk from climate changes are also those with highest economic importance to the region;
4) its fisheries are managed by five separate jurisdictions whose adaption responses will need to be well coordinated if negative impacts are to be reduced effectively and opportunities that arise are to be seized.

The Eyre Peninsula seafood industry formed Brand Eyre Peninsula in 2006, a collaborative market development program aimed to increase sales and market position in the domestic and export market. Integral to the brand is the education of the species’ attributes to all key stakeholders of the value chain including seafood wholesalers, retailers, food service and media. The results of market development initiatives have been communicated to the owner, head buyer or executive chef of businesses, however, the program failed to support training for key staff such as restaurant front of house and retail counter staff. There is a need for a simple, cost effective training tool due to the high turnover of these positions.

Australian and export clients have consistently requested a “Seafood Flavour Wheel” to assist in menu planning and tasting notes for chefs and sommeliers. Once developed, this tool would be distributed to an initial 500 existing clients to support immediate industry and consumer education. The development of the “Seafood Flavour Wheel” has an extensive level of support from its current client base.

The proposed “Seafood Flavour Wheel” will be a training guide benchmark and has the potential to expand to an Australian guide, inclusive of all seafood species. Specifically, the development of the Eyre Peninsula “Seafood Flavour Wheel” will assist the lack of knowledge and appreciation for the flavours of a target group of seafood species specific to that region.

Equipped with this knowledge, a united industry marketing approach will effectively connect customers with an experience of the unique regional flavour qualities of Eyre Peninsula’s premium seafood. Through this experience, customers will learn to recognise the sensory attributes of Eyre Peninsula seafood and distinguish these products from those originating from other Australian and international regions.

Implementation of ecosystem-based fishery management requires sound knowledge of food webs if the indirect effects of fishing on trophic structure are to be understood. There is an urgent need to construct a quantitative food web so that we can understand the ways in which the marked declines in the abundances of important fish species off the lower west coast of Australia, which led to the recent closure of the metropolitan commercial fishery, are likely to have impacted on the ecosystem. While there are sound dietary data for most of the more abundant and important species in this region, no such data are available for Snapper (Pagrus auratus) and Silver Trevally (Pseudocaranx dentex). Snapper was a primary target species for commercial fishers, and Snapper and Silver Trevally both continue to be of great importance to recreational fishers. Sound dietary data for these species, which take into account the ways in which their diets change with body size and season, are essential for the construction of a reliable food web. There is a need to combine the new dietary data for these species with those that were collated in the database developed in FRDC 2002/016 and with the results from more recent studies, converting them into common dietary categories, size categories and a common format before they can be used to construct a reliable food web. The opportunity exists, while Ian Potter remains actively involved in research, to apply the experience and knowledge that he and Margaret Platell possess (noting that these two biologists have been involved in collecting much of the available dietary data for the demersal fish species of south-western Australia) to bring together the results of approximately 15 years of research to create a food web for this region that will be invaluable for future research and management.