Management decisions should be based on good quality data. Any steps taken to improve an inadequate baseline will eventually improve data quality and the subsequent cost effectiveness of obtaining these data. Any part of the baseline where confusion can arise should be identified and improved as soon as possible. The fisheries coding system knees to be enhanced to improve its functionality to clarify names and assist users when obtaining or vetting fish data. It will also prove an important baseline for a variety of other industry uses. The resources are presently available to improve this baseline and these may not be available in the future. It also coincides with a period of activity whereby the names our seafood will be standardised and legislated. The project is timely and should be completed now.
In addition to the commercial fishing industry, fish names are frequently referred to by an extremely broad variety of groups including administrators, aquarists, editors, educators, lawyers, legislators, recreational fishermen, scientists, seafood consumers and writers. The need for a standard list of common names of Australian fishes was eloquently flagged by eminent Australian scientist, Gilbert Whitley, some thirty years ago (see attached excerpt from his paper, appendix 4). A national nomenclatural standard covering all Australian fishes is long overdue - no such standard presently exists for secondary commercial any bycatch species. CAAB has now been adopted as the industry wide coding system but would be considerably more useful if it contained standardised common name information and an image of each species.
The unavailability or inconsistency use of common names of fish has created a problem for all sectors of the seafood industry. It has also led to serious confusion when interpreting catch return sheets and fisheries data based on common names. Even the guidelines of this application form (ie Project title and identification) request the use of the approved marketing mane of each species. However, most secondary commercial and almost all bycatch species have not been allocated a single approved common name.
Whereas the process of establishing single names for the main commercial species has been contentious, it is likely to be much simpler for the remaining fishes. If approached properly, the task only needs to be done once. The final product should be definitive work on the common names of Australian fishes requiring minimal alteration in the future.
The recently published Australian Seafood Handbook has created many enquiries from governmental and commercial groups wanting to gain access to images held in the CSIRO fish image library. However, in it s present form, this image collection cannot be accessed cost effectively.. The bulk of the collection is in celluloid format and the digital component has bot been assigned to a search and retrieval oriented database. Hence, it is presently grossly under utilised. A logical step is to digitise the collection and make the images freely available on the CAAB website, simultaneously improving accessibility and making CAAB more user friendly.
