Every year large numbers of exotic marine species are accidently introduced into Australian waters as a result of vessel fouling, ballast water release, aquarium trade, or through aquaculture associated stock movement. Although the majority of exotics do not establish viable populations, over 250 aquatic invasives have become notorious pests (www.marinepests.gov.au) that have significant direct economic impact on aquaculture and fisheries industries. Indirect impact include blocking industrial water intake and outlet pipes, fouling of commercial and recreational vessels as well as modifying natural ecosystems by competing for food and space with indigenous species. The costs to industry, government, and the environment are significant and ongoing. The best prevention of pest spread is their early recognition and eradication by field workers, as once established eradication is almost impossible. This, however, entails the correct initial identification of the species. Because many exotic species closely resemble native species, it is critical to distinguish between native and introduced species that already occur here as well as to recognise new introductions. Training of stakeholders to recognise introductions and develop working relationships with the relevant taxonomic experts is critical so that this can be ongoing, which will facilitate early detection and development of emergency management strategies. The workshop attendees will be shown how to collect and preserve worms in order to be able to identify them and which characters are critical to examine. This will involve hands on experience in identification of potential pests and plenty of opportunities for face to face contact and informal communication with established experts in the field to develop relevant skills. Each participant will receive a fully-illustrated guide to facilitate identifications in the work place. The guide will contain previously unpublished data and will continually be updated as new information becomes available, also for sale to non-workshop participants.

Recent declines in Eastern Tasmania (Tarbath & Gardner, 2012) and Tiparra Reef in South Australia (Chick & Mayfield, 2012) suggest a potential for changes in productivity. Further challenges to successfully managing abalone include periods of poor recruitment in some areas, rising Australian east coast temperatures, the Victorian virus outbreak, toxic blooms in Tasmania, and mortality events in Tasmania.

All these challenges to current management indicate the need for more detailed and rapidly reactive and defensible management of Australian abalone stocks.

The management strategy evaluation (MSE) framework from FRDC 2007/020 “Biological Performance Indicators for abalone fisheries”, focussed on the utility of classical performance measures. However, the Multi-Criterion-Decision-Analysis Harvest Strategy (MCDA-HS) being developed in Tasmania will integrate classic fishery Performance Measures (PMs) with new Spatial PMs, and include local complexity in growth (the latter are important for the TAC/LML debate). Now GPS data loggers have become compulsory within the Tasmanian fishery (2006/029 – “Using GPS technology to improve fishery-dependent data collection in abalone fisheries”), the need to test these new empirical harvest strategies, that include spatial PMs, is becoming urgent. The MSE framework, therefore needs modification to successfully simulate the new spatial performance measures and then test the performance of the novel harvest strategies. South Australia introduced a non-spatial MCDA-HS without testing and an array of unintended consequences is becoming apparent. To retain confidence in the application of formal harvest strategies with associated decision rules testing the harvest strategies as they are developed remains important.

Novel harvest Strategies need to be tested to determine by how much they improve the setting of TACs and associated LMLs. There is a recognized need to interact with FRDC 2011/201: “Implementing a spatial assessment and decision process to improve fishery management outcomes using geo-referenced diver data” so both projects can benefit from each other.