Snapper Recruitment & Predation effects, Qld

[bobfromblacky]

Victoria snapper

Common name/s	Snapper
Scientific name	Chrysophrys auratus.
Minimum legal size	28cm
Bag limit	10 (of which no more than 3 fish may be equal to or exceed 40cm in length)

Yep 28 cm, you can fit these in your pocket, plenty out in port philip bay victoria taking their bag too, pretty bloody short sighted I think, maybe we have to learn the hard way.

[Andrew_P]

Avid rec fisher and science degree holder here with a few points to add to the discussion. The simplest and most effective way of rebuilding stocks is restricting take - the most extreme version is making a species no-take. Have a think about whether that is what you want. Furthermore, your 8 point solution contains severe misunderstandings and gross oversimplification of the complexity and function of the natural environment. For example:

There are documented reasons why stocking fish into estuaries does not work - unlike lakes, dams, and farms, they are not closed systems. Fish can die or leave the area and recaptures are rare and hard to measure meaning it is extremely difficult to see what affect the stocking has had (positive or otherwise). This in turn makes it very hard to get money to spend on restocking.

Artificial reefs have their place where they would be suitable. In fact there were a number of artificial reefs put in place following the Moreton Bay Marine Park rezoning as offsets to closed areas. They have been around for more than 10 years - hard to measure their impact on increasing habitat for juvenile snapper. On a scale even the size of Moreton Bay, their effect upon improving habitat for juveniles is far outweighed by aggregating adult fish and subjecting them to fishing pressure. Making the adults who produce the eggs easier to catch and preventing them from spawning again thereby shooting yourself in the foot.

Adult fish rarely grow old enough to stop spawning, and the belief that those larger fish being the breeders contributing the most to reseeding the stock is a feelgood fallacy - yes they have more eggs and higher quality, but there are exponentially more fish in the length classes closer to maturity (due to natural and fishing mortality) that make the numbers of eggs from the rare large/old fish insignificant.

All fairly straight forward lessons in biology/ecology

How do we fix it? I have my own thoughts on this. We complain about the stock assessments not having enough data to make precise calls on stock levels. We should be advocating for/ volunteering better recreational fishery information so that estimates of rec fisher numbers and harvest can reflect reality, and ensure regulations are changed in light of this better info. If a licence system is unpalatable because it is seen as a tax, how about creating a cost free licence or compulsory rec fishing registry to access Qld's natural fisheries resources? Would people be open to have their name down as a rec fisher in order to fish in Qld?

In the meantime, we can help by reducing our take and impact upon at risk species is additional to sticking to the regulations (i.e. don't fish for at risk species even if you are permitted).

[Lucky_Phill]

Andrew,

Great to have your input. From my experience, FQ scientists and managers rarely get their individual views or beliefs past a discussion table. Certainly stakeholders get little credit.


As part of the discussion, could I get the paper where it shows my points are an oversimplification and why they would not work. Included of course is the program and results thereof.


The wild stocking scenario does hold some value and to say it is difficult to get recaptures and difficult to measure may hold water, but guessing virgin bio-mass is the basis for current stock assessments and sustainability measures.


The arti reefs in Moreton Bay you say are an “ offset “ to rezoning ( Green Zones ), the square kilometers of green zone ( 16% of Moreton Bay, apparently The Greens wanted 30% ) is far more than the very very small size of the arti’s meant to offset it. That call as an offset holds no water, IMO. I also sat on the working group for the arti deployments in Moreton Bay and it was a farce. The AMCS stopping materials of opportunity being used was a massive set back. Again, you say hard to measure impact of these and yet again I refer you to virgin bio-mass. Maybe it isn’t the job of Fisheries to measure impact, maybe it is to serve the stakeholders of the fishery ? ALL stakeholders.


Spawning adults, yep, given their aggregation and thinking should we be affording them more aggregation habitats is my good question. The current size limit on Snapper allows the fish to spawn a number of times, 2 or 3, I am unsure… maybe more, given the right conditions. We have closed seasons for spawning anyway…


Yes, ecology and biology, all good books I am sure, not discounting them, but there are vastly more factors in the life cycle of fish than you attest to or are able to input.


Stock assessments have been given anecdotal evidence for many years by pro’s and rec’s and this should be taken into account, but it seems you can’t factor this into the data. Further, the current Shark predation of all fisheries must be accounted for and in some peoples opinion is quite significant… maybe as significant as recreation take, who knows…….. same for Moreton Bay trawler by-catch and we all know how bad that is. Predation ...... Trawlation ????



It seems to me and others, FQ can only attempt to manage the fishery by the simplest and easiest means and that is to hammer the recreational angler, time and time again. Until FQ can input … ALL … the required data, the management protocols will never change. I again point out that we harvest, but do not sow.



If I were to say to you, that should the Government implement a range of measures as I outlined and despite any results in stock assessments, that the average fisho would be grateful by way of votes in an election, because the Government is “ seen to be doing “ something, would that scenario be attractive enough to garner funding for those projects going forward ?


To round this out, and thank you for reading thus far, I cannot speak for others regrading a no cost or full cost licence. Recreational Fishers are quirky, they are apathetic towards things they do not understand or see in their interests or the fishery interest. They are particularly gun shy of a full cost licence due to what has happened in other States ( Fishing Havens ) and this State Governments slight of hand taking the RUF and plonking it into general revenue. It comes down to a matter of trust… you trust us to abide by the fishing rules and in general, we do, but for us to trust the hand that keeps on smacking us is a bit rich, right now.

FQ is not the Government, we know that, but the Government has not done FQ any favours, because FQ were left high and dry by the Government on many decisions impacting recreational fishers of Qld. Unfortunately, you became the face of the enemy. There is no need for enemies, we all want the same thing for our fishery, it is just that having FQ hamstrung by funding and opportunity creates a gap in the friendship that will take a mountain of work to overcome.


All I see is that there is no vision at FQ , no thinking outside the box, no “ let’s try this or that and see what happens “, no leeway. You have your book and read from the pages like it is a Bible, There are many Bibles and Authors writing them.

I will provide a very often used quote here and in direct reference to the Sate of FQ, “ for evil to prevail, it takes but for good men to do nothing “. I am sure you can work this out. Again, thank you for your input, always welcome.


cheers LP

[Dignity]

And some things while introduced with good intentions just come back to commercialism. Phill, you mentioned the closure for spawning reasons yet I distinctly recall the snapper/pearl pearl closures were muted to be several weeks earlier than current. Now I may be sceptical but that coincided with interstate school holidays, not surprisingly the dates were shifted.
Unfortunately including ALL stakeholders will cause such changes to what was a good idea.

[Lovey80]

On the data. I am against any form of “improved” data. Either we have a comprehensive catch card/log book on threatened species, and it is considered as robust as commercial/charter data when being put into these models (no more rounding up for boat registrations etc), or nothing at all.

My distrust in FQ isn’t with the continued changes in regulations as fast as you change models to assess the biomass. My distrust is I honestly believe they haven’t got the faintest idea of what the state of the fishery really is.

[Andrew_P]

Phill, the information in my post above is completely my opinion, and summarises info that is widely available.
Yes I wear 2 hats - I am an avid rec fisher and also contribute to the science of monitoring key fish species including snapper, Pearl perch and Spanish mackerel. I also love building fishing rods, surfing and am active on other local fishing and surfing forums.
I responded to your original post with the intention of trying to explain why several parts of your plan may likely not be implemented, knowing the biology and ecology of the fish species we are talking about.
I tried to give specific examples of why this was so.
I tried to communicate the impact of regulation changes on rec fishers and where well known information gaps exist to try to improve collection of data.
I mentioned a fisher registry to account for recent variation in rec fisher estimates of between 700k and 1 million so that would solve a huge problem in estimating harvest. In my opinion I think rec fishers are mature and informed enough to be ready for the conversation about rec licences and how they may look if adopted by government. Once again, promoting discussion and sharing my personal opinion. .
I did not contribute personally to the writing of the snapper, Pearl perch or SM stock assessments but understand the process and support the results as they are the best estimates of stock that we have.
I understand you will likely forward these posts to the powers that be which I encourage - part of my role as a scientist is to promote discussion and learning.
I have been part of the Ausfish community for more than a decade and genuinely enjoy reading the reports and contributing to discussion. I hope that I can remain part of the community.

[Lovey80]

Andrew, this is a serious question. As a fisheries guy that has had to deal with the models over the years, so I know you can answer this.

let’s say tomorrow a new campaign was started where an app was introduced and within 12 months every recreational caught snapper was recorded. Length, basic region (say inshore Moreton bay, offshore Brisbane, offshore gold cost, offshore sunshine coast, offshore wide-bay north). Plus numbers. FQ no have an almost absolute number on take every year.

The Rec data is now comprehensive. It’s now as absolute as the commercial and charter data as it could possible be. Remember this is still a hypothetical.

let’s say the Rec take was say 50% below the current models (let’s call this a bold prediction). Would the models that reverse engineer everything back to the virgin biomass now re-calculate the % of virgin biomass back to a vastly different number? Would the current biomass be now much larger than the current models?

I know this for others reading sounds like a difficult question. But Andrew knows the exact answer to the question.

[Andrew_P]

Sorry to disappoint you Lovey80 but I am not a stock assessment scientist so cannot answer your question categorically. What I can say is that rec harvest is only one piece of the puzzle which goes into a stock assessment. The fish’s biology (how long it lives, how quick it grows, how often it spawns, how many eggs it has) and the trends seen in age range of harvested fish are combined with harvest estimates in the models to give estimates of biomass. If you changed harvest figures for any sector that would definitely change the result. But you can’t change the observed trends in age range that have been collected over the years (since 2007 for snapper) or the biology of the fish so the model needs to account for this as well as updated/reported rec harvest.

So if the estimates are way off, how does this affect the result? To account for variations in estimates the stock assessment will run multiple scenarios. This is where guys like Phill, rec, charter and commercial fishers are included in the working groups to voice their opinion about which estimates they think are closest to reality. This allows a range of biomass estimates to come from the model, and as important as the final result is (% of unfished biomass) are the trends in range of estimates of the various scenarios.

In more recent stock assessments some important environmental factors which are shown to impact the species being studied have been measured are included which may also have an impact on results.

That is my understanding of how a stock assessment works.

FYI This information is always reported in the non-technical summary at the start of a stock assessment report, which is written in plain language so that the majority of stakeholders can understand it.

I hope this helps

[Lucky_Phill]

Andrew, you are more than welcome to continue to contribute, that is what this forum is about. Please know that nothing is personal here.... other than the friendships we have built over the years through good info, good banter and at times, robust debate.

We all have different views and opinions and some of us even have facts ............

I am in constant contact with DAF on a number of issues and currently waiting on replies in regard to some Snapper issues I have raised here and elsewhere.

I believe in the too much info is not good, same as not enough............. where does the right amount fit ?????

Attitudes change for varying reasons but mostly because people believe what they are told or see. It is known that actions speak louder than words.... It may come to pass that a rec licence of sorts will be welcomed by the rec community. Who knows.

LP

[chris69]

And some things while introduced with good intentions just come back to commercialism. Phill, you mentioned the closure for spawning reasons yet I distinctly recall the snapper/pearl pearl closures were muted to be several weeks earlier than current. Now I may be sceptical but that coincided with interstate school holidays, not surprisingly the dates were shifted.
Unfortunately including ALL stakeholders will cause such changes to what was a good idea.

Yer it funny how they can change dates when spawning time are generally on moon and tide phases like how nature intended it to be.

[Andrew_P]

Appreciated Phill. I’m happy to contribute to robust discussions about fish, fishing and rod building where I feel I can help!

[Dignity]

Yer it funny how they can change dates when spawning time are generally on moon and tide phases like how nature intended it to be.

Chris, the closure when intodced 3 years ago was 15 July to 15 Aug and is still the same this year so I'm not sure which moon phase they are following. Mind you I haven't check what the moon phase was in 2020 vs 2024.