Arrival Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia
Posted by Andrew via Email at 10:40 PM, August 09, 2004
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| (C) Greenpeace |
We're going to be busy here. On our way in we passed six purse seine fishing ships transhipping (transferring) tuna onto reefers (refrigerator ships). We docked two spots down from another purse seiner - and yet another passed us while we were waiting for the customs officials to finish processing our paperwork. Yep, got a lot going on here.
Waiting to welcome us was the family of Hayhow Daniel Nanoto. They brought garlands for everyone on the crew. We were really touched. I'll say more on the story of Hayhow another time, when I can tell it properly.
Larger photo
A few of us also went for a walk down to the far end of the dock. That's where the long liners unload. Workers were using a crane to move big yellow fin tuna from the hold of a locally flagged ship to the processing facility. One of the long line captains told me a Japanese company buys the fish for $30 US a pound. A lot of the fish I saw looked like they weighed at least 50 pounds. Not bad.
I also saw the occasional marlin going into the plant, even though they had been targeting tuna. In the trade this is called "byproduct", which is when you catch a species that, even though not what you were going after, still has commercial value. This is as opposed to "bycatch", which is the catch of a species that has no (or very little) commercial value. Usually, bycatch ends up going overboard dead - a total waste.
Fisherman, have both moral and practical reasons to avoid bycatch. In the short term, every long line hook taken by a (economically) worthless species is lost money. In the long term, they rely on healthy ocean ecosystems - the underwater web of life that is poorly understood and can be hurt by intentional or unintentional overfishing.
Fortunately, there are ways to minimize bycatch when longlining. How the deep lines are set, spacing of the hooks, choice of bait and choice of fishing location all can all help. Unfortunately, not all fishermen take all the care they can or should, and with a technique like longlining there will always be some bycatch (though not as much as purse seining). So of course the amount and type of bycatch has to be monitored, and regulated.
One idea has been to require fishing vessels to bring their bycatch to shore, along with the rest of their fish. The thinking is that some use could be made of it, and ships that catch more bycatch would be penalized because it takes up space in their hold - incentivising fishermen to improve their fishing practices.
