Journal article
Fish Rejections in the Marine Aquarium Trade: An Initial Case Study Raises Concern for Village-Based Fisheries
PLoS One, Vol.11(3), e0151624
2016
Abstract
A major difficulty in managing wildlife trade is the reliance on trade data (rather than capture data) to monitor exploitation of wild populations. Collected organisms that die or are rejected before a point of sale often go unreported. For the global marine aquarium trade, identifying the loss of collected fish from rejection, prior to export, is a first step in assessing true collection levels. This study takes a detailed look at fish rejections by buyers before export using the Papua New Guinea marine aquarium fishery as a case study. Utilizing collection invoices detailing the species and quantity of fish (Actinopteri and Elasmobranchii) accepted or rejected by the exporting company it was determined that, over a six month period, 24.2% of the total fish catch reported (n = 13,886) was rejected. Of the ten most collected fish families, rejection frequency was highest for the Apogonidae (54.2%), Chaetodontidae (26.3%), and Acanthuridae (18.2%) and lowest for Labridae (6.6%) and Hemiscylliidae (0.7%). The most frequently cited reasons for rejection were fin damage (45.6% of cases), undersized fish (21.8%), and fish deemed too thin (11.1%). Despite fishers receiving feedback on invoices explaining rejections, there was no improvement in rejection frequencies over time (r = -0.33, P = 0.15) with weekly rejection frequencies being highly inconsistent (range: 2.8% to 79.4%; s = 16.3%). These findings suggest that export/ import statistics can greatly underestimate collection for the marine aquarium trade as additional factors such as fisher discards, escapees, post-collection mortalities, and unregulated domestic trade would further contribute to this disparity
Details
- Title
- Fish Rejections in the Marine Aquarium Trade: An Initial Case Study Raises Concern for Village-Based Fisheries
- Authors
- Thane A Militz (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australian Centre for Pacific Islands ResearchJeff Kinch (Author) - National Fisheries Authority, Papua New GuineaSimon Foale (Author) - James Cook UniversityPaul C Southgate (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast - Faculty of Science, Health, Education and Engineering
- Publication details
- PLoS One, Vol.11(3), e0151624; 14
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science
- Date published
- 2016
- DOI
- 10.1371/journal.pone.0151624
- ISSN
- 1932-6203
- Copyright note
- Copyright © 2016 Militz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Science and Engineering - Legacy; Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Science, Technology and Engineering
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99449927802621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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- Domestic collaboration
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- Marine & Freshwater Biology
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