Ever So Blue: Reef Rangers 4: Sustainable fishing

After a break through Ramazan, the Reef Rangers club is up and running once again.

In this activity the Reef Rangers worked as “Fisheries Scientists” interviewing some of the oldest fishermen in neighbouring island Maalhos to learn about how fishing has changed over the years. Some of the fishermen that were interviewed were fishing as long back as the 1950s and have witnessed tremendous changes in the Baa Atoll fish stocks. After the interviews were conducted, the Reef Rangers analysed the clear patterns in the fishermens answers. The answers revealed huge pressures to the fish stocks, particularly tuna and grouper. In the 1950s one fisherman used to catch 50kg tuna in one trip by pole and line (1 hook), and yet 20 years ago he was forced into changing to long line fishing (1000s of hooks) as it was becoming increasingly difficult to catch tuna. Despite using thousands of hooks, his catch only increased by a very small amount, indicating a fish stock under severe pressure. By changing to this intensive fishing technique, we would expect his catch to increase by a huge amount, but this was not the case. Other trends were fishermen having to travel much further to find fish, and a general decrease in the size of fish caught, particularly grouper.