Bottom Trawl

The Irish prawn - bottom trawl FIP is based in ICES Area VII. The Irish vessels involved in the fishery are mainly trawlers who target nephrops with some vessels carrying out freezing at sea.

FIP membership will be comprised of commercial fishing vessels (who require a licence issued by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to be allocated a quota to fish in the fishery), processors, retailers, the Irish Marine Institute and BIM (the Irish Sea Fisheries Board).

The initial focus on the FIP will be on establishing the FIP group itself and identifing and addressing any sustainability issues in the fishery.

The Suriname corvina bottom-trawl fishery has Cynoscion acoupa and Cynoscion virescens as main target species. The main landing points are located in the four estuaries of the country: the Marowijne estuary, the Suriname-Commewijne estuary, the Coppename-Saramacca estuary and the Corantijin-Nickery estuary. A vessel monitoring system has been implemented for all trawlers as of 2007 and licensing is compulsory for all fishing units. Sea Delight, Deep Sea Atlantic and CeDePesca are working towards the design and implementation of a FIP. Currently, an assessment of the fishery's performance against the MSC standard is taking place.

Shrimp in the northwest Pacific coast of Mexico, including the Gulf of California, is the most important fishery in México. It has the highest economic value of landings, averaging $340 million. It is also the highest ranked fishery in terms of number of vessels (750 bottom trawlers and about 16,000 small-scale vessels) and number of direct jobs (37,000 direct jobs and 75,000 indirect ones). It places third in terms of volume with annual landings of approximately 42,000 tons during a season that begins in September and runs through March. The small-scale shrimp fishery in the Gulf of California contributes to these figures with annual landings of 16,000 tons, of which, 10,600 are produced in the Sonora-Sinaloa corridor.

Sustainability  Challenges:

According to the National Fisheries Institute, the fishery is at the maximum sustainable yield, therefore, the management strategies are designed to maintain the reproductive biomass, protect the offspring, and avoid an increase the fishing effort. However, the absence of an updated, robust and publicly available stock assessment impedes confirming whether or not the harvest strategy and control rules in place are effective.

Regarding the environmental performance of the fishing gear, there is publicly available information on the chinchorro de linea and Suripera environmental impacts. There is no publicly available information for the bottom trawl used by the small-scale producers.

Other concerns related to the management system include the operation of non-authorized vessels and the use of fishing gears with a different configuration to that required by the regulatory framework.

Project UK Fisheries Improvements (PUKFI) is working towards an environmentally sustainable future for UK fisheries by running Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs) on eight UK fisheries that have been selected by the UK supply chain. They were selected due to their importance for the UK market.

Two species of monkfish (also called anglerfish), Lophius piscatorius and L. budegassa, are caught in an important set of fisheries in the western Channel and Western Approaches. It should be noted that the gillnet UoA is composed of (i) trammel nets (>220 mm mesh size) GTR and (ii) a combination of set gillnets (anchored) GNS, gillnets and entangling nets (not specified) GEN and gillnets (not specified) GN, all >220 mm. 

Although separate stocks, these are managed together through a shared TAC. ICES’ advice is provided for both species separately but only L. piscatorius has reference points and uses a precautionary, MSY approach.   ICES consider this to be a Category 3 stock where management is essentially based on recent trends, rather than well-defined harvest rules.  Under P1, this Action Plan therefore seeks to address this through better single species management, a reduction in unwanted target catch through the development of alternative management measures and the introduction of probabilistic analysis of stock assessment e.g. include confidence limits.

In P2, a major part of the plan is developed to improving the major weakness of the fisheries identified by the pre-assessment, the management of secondary species caught in these fisheries.  This will cover other fish as well as out of scope species such as seabirds and marine mammals, esp. for the gillnet fisheries, as well as ETPs.  The Action Plan also looks at reducing the impact of these fisheries – especially the beam trawl segment – on habitats, especially VMEs.  The plan also calls for a Scale Intensity Consequence Analysis (SICA) analysis of the impact of beam trawling on the ecosystem.

Under P3, the plan seeks the development of a fisheries -specific management plan that that includes explicit short and long-term objectives.  This should formalise the existing harvest strategy and harvest control rules for both species of anglerfish.  It also calls for external evaluation of the management of these anglerfish fisheries, possibly though a final pre-assessment before the FIP is concluded and the fisheries might be considering entering into full MSC assessment process.