Fish Fight Charter – Seafish response Seafish supports the overall concept of establishing MPA’s in order to protect the marine environment. MPA’s are already playing an important role and the UK fishing industry has played a significant role in helping establish, monitor and designate the areas for protection. Seafish had produced its own guide to MPA’s available at the following link: http://www.seafish.org/media/sustainability/marine-protection/marine-protected-areas 1.
Seafish supports carefully considered and discriminating use of MPAs in order to protect the environment with varying degrees of restrictions on fishing activity, tailored to the local circumstances of particular areas, as they can have benefits for our seas, fishermen and their communities. But blanket networks of MPAs (such as the ones called for in the Fish Fight Charter), indiscriminately placed throughout the coastline, will achieve neither environmental nor commercial goals.
2.
There is a false assumption that MPAs bring unalloyed environmental benefit. On the contrary, not having the correct science or displacing fishing activity from MPAs could negate the ecological benefits afforded by an MPA network. Research has shown that MPAs are best suited to areas of low fishing intensity where seabed communities have the best chance of recovering and the environmental effect of displacing fishing is less compared to displacing vessels from heavily fished grounds to areas of high sensitivity.
3.
There is a strong case for designating areas of low fishing intensity as MPAs. Moreover, MPAs should be continually monitored, their effectiveness reviewed and designation flexible to allow for de-designation and / or the proposal of alternative sites should MPAs fail to achieve their objectives. However, what is not justified is the application of the so-called ‘precautionary principle’ to install a vast network of MPAs just in case they may prove useful in the future.
4.
Seafish rejects the claim that No Take Zones (NTZs) are justified to protect commercial fish stocks in temperate waters, because there is no empirical evidence of such benefits. The latest research at Lundy MCZ (marine reserve) has shown very little change since potting was banned in 2003: “From the results, we conclude that potting for lobsters and crabs in inshore waters seems to have no detectable effects over the timescale of the experiment. In addition to being management goals/tools in their own right, strongly protected areas such as Sanctuary/No-Take Zones provide an opportunity to test experimental hypotheses about the effects of fishing. Our study shows there were no conservation benefits, in terms of the investigated species, arising from exclusion of potting in this Marine