ENVIRONMENT: Seahorses, Jellyfish Are targets of Fishing Industry

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 26 1996 (IPS) - Booming Asian demand for exotic marine species like seahorses and jellyfish are leading to new threats to these ocean denizens as well as to turtles and other species.

Over-fishing of the seahorse is already threatening stocks, according to a report released this month by the London-based Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce (TRAFFIC). The main market for the seahorses is China, where the fish is sold for its reputed aphrodisiac and medicinal properties.

Asian demand inspired the Florida state government this summer to urge local fishing communities to catch cannonball jellyfish — a marine species that looks like a fist-sized mass of fibres — to sell as a culinary delight in China, Thailand, and South Korea.

Environmentalists say this trade may eventually threaten local turtle populations which live off the jellyfish.

“We’re very concerned,” said Casey Gluckman, a lawyer at the Florida League of Anglers. “Once you open a commercial harvest, people invest in the business, and it’s hard to turn back. People really don’t know what effect this could have.”

Disaster stories abound in the fishing industry, not least in Florida, where unchecked demand for certain fish has caused stocks to plummet faster than the fish can breed, leading eventually to extinction. This, in turn, has put hundreds of fishing boats out of business.

Over the last 20 years, demand from Taiwan and Japan for mullet roe created a booming business in Florida, causing the mullet population to decline. The mullet stocks began to recover this year after a ban was imposed.

Over-fishing of one species often threatens other species that either depend or live alongside the species being caught. In Florida, fishing practices for ocean shrimp already threaten the turtle. The reptile is easily trapped in the huge trawling nets used in the Caribbean and the west central Atlantic.

Trawlers have caused similar threats to other marine species, including the dolphin. In the 1950s, when trawler captains discovered that schools of yellow fin, skipjack, and black-eye tuna often swim below the dolphins in the Pacific, they took to casting their kilometre-long, purse-seines under the dolphin pods to catch the tuna.

An estimated 300,000 dolphins were killed in such nets in 1990, but trawlers have since been ordered to change their practices. Better nets and different fishing techniques now allow the bulk of dolphins to escape.

Seahorses are also trapped in trawler nets. The major threat, however, comes from small boats which use scoop nets and small seines to trap a variety of seahorses, ranging from the one- centimetre-long Australian seahorse to the 30-centimetre-long Pacific seahorse. Some seahorses are also caught by hand.

Amanda Vincent, the author of the TRAFFIC report, says that 32 countries trade in dead and live seahorses. The largest importers are China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, while the largest exporters are India, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The global trade involves at least 20 million seahorses a year.

Hong Kong retailers sell the preferred large, bleached seahorses for up to 1,200 dollars per kilo. Japanese retailers prefer smaller seahorse which they sell for 11.49 dollars each, almost five time the going rate of 2.80 dollars in Taiwan.

One of the unusual aspects of seahorses is the fact that they are strictly monogamous, so the regeneration rates are slower than most other species. If one partner in a couple dies or is trapped, the other partner does not pair up with another seahorse to reproduce.

Florida fishing communities are now hoping to cash in on a relatively untapped market segment that would also retail in Asia: cannonball jellyfish, which are also caught in small nets rather than large trawler driftnets.

Florida state officials are running four-day training courses this summer for 80 local fishworkers on catching and preparing jellyfish.

Fishworkers in Jacksonville and the Panhandle will learn how to dry and process the fish. The upper “bell” is separated from the lower portion, or ‘legs’, which are diced and used as seasoning flakes. The choice bell is cut into shoestring-sized strips and marinated in soy sauce before serving.

Lee Schlesinger, a spokesman for the Florida Marine Fisheries Commission says they have crafted rules to ensure that the stocks of jellyfish do not crash. He does admit that it is impossible to predict whether the rules will work.

International agreements to limit fish catch have had limited success. In the Grand Banks area of the Atlantic between 1986 and 1991, the European Union reported total catches that were 478,000 tonnes above the 115,000 tonnes they were allocated by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organisation that regulates catches in the region.

Environmental groups like the San-Francisco Earth Island Institute also say they are unconvinced that many of the so-called “safer” fishing techniques implemented in recent years have worked.

Mark Palmer, a lobbyist at Earth Island, says U.S. fishing industry claims that the new techniques have prevented dolphin deaths are not necessarily true.

“Observers say that the dolphin kill is down to 5,000, but dolphin populations have not recovered significantly,” he said. “It’s possible that the dolphins that are released from the nets later die from the trauma of being trapped.”

Earth Island says the “turtle exclusion devices” shrimp farmers now use to prevent accidentally trapping the reptile have also not proved effective. Thousands of turtles are washing up dead even as the U.S. Coast Guard says 96 percent of shrimp fishermen follow the rules.

Fish marketers blame pollution, dredging, ship traffic and beachfront development for the continued turtle deaths.