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.

To assess whether the ESD and MEE objectives are met there is a need to determine the status of prawns stocks in the NPF and to develop guidelines to define whether the present status of the stocks may require management actions. It is important to precisely define what population parameters should be monitored and what biological reference points should these parameters be compared in order to determine whether management action is required. The Northern Prawn Fishery Assessment Group (NPFAG) has identified that spawning stock biomass and standardised fishing effort are the two most important indicators for target stocks in the NPF. The NPFAG has also established that targets and limits for these indicators need to be set and reassessed as new information is collected. The NPFAG has also recommended that future advice provided to them by researchers should include an explicit measurement of the probabilities that each of these targets may be exceeded. Calculation of such probabilities requires formal risk analysis to be carried out as part of the stock assessment.

Additionally, there are a number of future management options that have been recently considered by NORMAC. These include reductions of pool of the licensing units used in the NPF, (A-units, representing vessel length and engine power), gear restrictions as well as further seasonal and spatial closures. Although the operational implications of adopting some of these options have been the subject of NORMAC discussions, the scientific evaluation of options is not carried out in a structured framework but rather as individual assessments as different options are proposed by NORMAC. There is a need to establish a structured framework for management strategy evaluation so that the NPFAG and NORMAC can compare different options in a consistent way. This framework for management strategy evaluation should allow for the integration of risk analysis into the evaluation of management options. The consequences of each management strategy should be quantified and evaluated against the indicator of performance established by the NPFAG. The evaluation should include the estimation of the probability that, in the future, certain undesirable or desirable states of the stock are reached.