News extra – Wild salmon
Who ate all the smolts? Atlantic nations flout advice over bumper mackerel shoals BY MICHAEL VINEY
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HE strongest voice for marine science in the north-east Atlantic comes from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), based in Denmark. With seagoing data from national research agencies, including Ireland’s Marine Institute, and surveys of its own, ICES tries to guide Europe’s political decisions on human use of the ocean. The council’s precautionary ‘ecosystem approach’ demands concern for ocean life as a whole. But in dealing with national politics, fixing and sharing catches of individual species is still its main business. One such species on which it issues advice and conducts research is mackerel. There is no long-term management strategy between fishing nations relating to the pressure on mackerel stocks, and Iceland, Russia and Greenland still set their own quotas. In Bergen, Norway, last November, the EU, Norway and the Faroe Islands agreed a total allowable catch of mackerel in the north-east Atlantic for 2019 of 653,438 tonnes, a 20 per cent cut from 2018. Ireland’s Killybegs trawlermen feared worse. ICES had urged a reduction of 61 per cent. Its scientists had claimed a severe decline in stock since 2011. But Sean O’Donoghue, head of the Killybegs Fishermen’s Organisation, insisted that Irish and all other trawler fleets were finding large shoals of mackerel over the entire north-east ocean, suggesting an actual increase in stocks. O’Donoghue’s narrative also appears in the Marine Institute’s latest advisory Stock Book as additional ‘information from stakeholders’. Along
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with ‘good recruitment to the fishery’, it asserts that mackerel is being caught ‘in substantial amounts’ outside the usual target waters. ICES agreed in Bergen to look at the evidence again and come to another meeting with the coastal states in the next few months. The council is used to having its advice resisted, but this conflict seems exceptional. It also coincides with a new and dramatic scientific hypothesis that claims an explosion of Atlantic mackerel, and blames it for major declines in salmon and seabird populations. This comes from Dr Jens Christian Holst, a scientist at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen until 2013. An authority on the ecology of salmon at sea, Holst worked for many years on Norwegian herring stocks before switching to studying fishery management in the wider ocean ecosystem. His approach has been controversial, and he now works as an adviser for the commercial pelagic trawler fleets of Norway. But Holst’s knowledge is also valued by the Atlantic Salmon Trust, where research director is Prof Ken Whelan, long eminent in Irish salmon research.
Above: Mackerel Opposite: Salmon smolt
www.fishfarmer-magazine.com
05/02/2019 14:59:54