Fisheries issues in East Malaysia

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Fisheries

issues in

East Malaysia

Managers and fishers are coming to realise that the sea is not bottomless and poorly managed fishing activities can reduce marine biodiversity and make fisheries uneconomic.

The mean trophic level of species groups in fisheries globally declined from 1950 to 1994, indicating a change in marine food webs from long-lived, high trophic level, piscivorous bottoms fish towards short-lived, low trophic level invertebrates and planktivorous pelagic fish. This has been especially evident in the Gulf of Thailand.

Many of the fishing practices used by fishers in East Malaysia are very destructive - blast fishing, cyanide fishing or simple overfishing of a resource. Our surveys have shown over 95% reduction in commercial fish populations.

However, alternatives to illegal destructive techniques do exist, and have been introduced at our Banggi Islands Coral Reef Protection Programme site.

THE FISHERIES OF THE WORLD ARE SERIOUSLY OVERFISHED AND FEW HAVE THE HEAVY POPULATION PRESSURES OF THE COASTAL WATERS OF SOUTH EAST ASIA.

According to IUCN (1996), 117 exclusively marine fishes are threatened but most marine species have simply not been evaluated. A workshop in 1996 dealt with only a small proportion of fish species. If the real number of threatened marine fish species is a problem, how do we evaluate the risk of extinction in the less well-known groups such as crinoids, tardigrades, platyhelminthes and other invertebrates and microorganisms?

The fisheries status for a number of commercial species is better known.

Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua	vulnerable	No significant fishery for about 5 years
Atlantic bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus	vulnerable	Populations are very low
Queen conch, Strombus gigas	endangered	see Appendix 2
Giant clams, Tridacna gigas	endangered	Protected in Malaysia
Humphead wrasse, Cheilinus undulatus	endangered	Not yet protected
Giant grouper	endangered	Not yet protected
Most shark species	endangered	Not yet protected

The humphead wrasse, groupers and giant clam are cases of market overfishing where high prices, efficient harvest and delivery systems are able to rapidly exhaust a resource. That 'efficiency' may continue to operate when prices decline as supply decreases, fishing down to very low remnants of stocks. Market overfishing contrasts with subsistence overfishing and Malthusian overfishing. In subsistance overfishing, as human populations increase, the numerous poor, simply to survive, reduce fish populations often by destructive techniques. In short, market overfishing is driven by greed, Malthusian overfishing by survival.

Species which are not prime targets of fisheries may nevertheless be affected. The Barndoor skate, Raja laevis, the largest skate in the northwest Atlantic is now close to extinction. A large fisheries area south of Newfoundland had a population of about 600,000 in the 1950s, but by the 1970s the population numbered about 500. The big skate was probably the victim of trawler bycatches. A recent southeastern Australian king prawn fishery was assessed for bycatch. In catching 1,579 tons of prawn, the fleet also caught some 16,434 tons of bycatch involving some 80 species of finfish, crustaceans and molluscs -- a bycatch to prawn ratio of 10.4 to 1. Of this, an estimated 2,952 tons was retained for sale, and the remaining 13,458 tons was thrown overboard.

In Malaysian waters there is simply insufficient information to assess the status of many of the species which are caught by the various fisheries.

SOME OF THE AREAS OF CONCERN:

Cyanide fishing, blast fishing, muro ami, putatino, reef collecting

= ILLEGAL and hard to regulate

Bottom trawling, reef fisheries

= LEGAL but hard to regulate

Mangrove crab pot fishing, pelagic fisheries

= LEGAL and sustainable

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