Beche-de-mer ban continues

By MOUA OMOA
THE moratorium on the beche-de-mer fishery has been extended because there is still a low density for sustainable harvesting, the National Fisheries Authority says.
Responding to calls made by various groups to re-open the fishery and provide stock assessment results, NFA said that updated annual assessment results were available at the provincial fisheries offices or at the NFA head office in Port Moresby.  
Sedentary fisheries manager Luanah Yaman reaffirmed the NFA’s stand to extend the moratorium, stating that research and surveys carried out showed that the average densities for each specie across the provinces was still too low for sustainable harvesting.
“Density which is the number of sea cucumbers living close to each other on the reef is very important because the female egg and the sperm of the male are fertilised outside in the water column and therefore density needs to be high for the sperms to be able to fertilise the female eggs,” he said in a statement this week.
“The fertilised eggs hatch and drift in the ocean currents for weeks but only one in every one thousand egg develops successfully into a juvenile sea cucumber and one in every one hundred becomes an adult and so it is important the density of a specie in an area has to be abundant to allow stocks to successfully reproduce and sustain itself.
“The stock situation is slowly improving but has yet to reach a stage where the fishery can be opened and as such the NFA’s decision to extend the closure of the BDM fishery is to enable stocks to recover to viable levels in order to improve stock densities, stock sizes and optimum economic yields for our people.”
The beche-de-mer fishery has been closed for the last three years since late 2009 due to overfishing across the 14 maritime provinces at least for the 22-plus species targeted by the fishery and has been further extended.
The three-year closure was to help sea cucumber stocks recover from the overfished status to near depletion and during this time (2010-12) NFA carried out sea cucumber survey in eight maritime provinces (Milne Bay, Madang, East Sepik, Manus, New Ireland, East New Britain, Autonomous Region of Bougainville and Western) and results were used to help assess the levels of the recovery.
The assessment indicated results of very low densities for all the species in the eight provinces.