Project number: 2017-063
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $60,000.00
Principal Investigator: Ian McDonald
Organisation: Centre for Invasive Species Solutions
Project start/end date: 2 Jul 2017 - 3 Feb 2018
Contact:
FRDC
TAGS
Recreational Fishing
Invasive Species
Community
Biology
SPECIES
European Carp

Need

With a major investment in carp control by the Australian Government, it is an opportune time to enhance public awareness of the issue and create a social licence to operate.

While it is easily assumed that everyone knows that European carp are a problem for our waterways, there can still be opposition against their control due to a lack of understanding regarding what their current impact is, what our waterways used to be like prior to Carp establishing and what will be the impact if we do nothing.

There is an urgent need to enhance the public awareness and understanding of what our waterways could be if carp were better controlled and what our waterways were like prior to carp.

This project aims to collect a series of short stories from Australians who remember what life was like BC or before carp.

The major goal from this project is to galvanise the support needed for action on carp and to enhance the social licence to use a biocontrol agent - which can have a negative connotation.

The project concept, based on sharing short stories and vignettes of Australians, is based largely on similar projects which have proved successful using this format such as Faces of CSIRO - https://faces.csiro.au/ or the popular Humans of New York blog -www.humansofnewyork.com.

Objectives

1. Awareness raising around the issue of carp and the need for carp control
2. Enhancing traffic to the NCCP Facebook page through the use of compelling and fresh stories
3. Enhancing traffic to the NCCP website through the creation of a blog series

Final report

Author: Ian McDonald
Final Report • 2018-02-19 • 103.47 KB
2017-063-DLD.pdf

Summary

The present study, undertaken by Invasive Animals Ltd, was developed to address a need for incorporating living memory of waterway changes resulting from cyprinus carpio introduction into public discussion surrounding potential use of cyprinid herpesvirus (CyHV-3) as a biocontrol measure. There is concern that through shifts in social and work conditions, fewer people are in one place long enough to note shifting environmental conditions, and so perceive existing conditions at any time as 'normal'. By interviewing people who have actively used waterways affected by carp, and have memories of the same waterways prior to carp invasion, a social record is made of impacts on humans and environment over time . By providing such memories to the public audience through video and social media, this study provides a means of informing a wider of audience of 'baseline' waterway conditions that is likely to have been previously unknown to them. 

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