Trout farming, the business of producing and selling high quality rainbow trout, has been expanding rapidly in the last 5 years. There are now some 20 freshwater farms in operation producing over 500 tonnes per annum. Initially some farms were operated as part of an integrated agricultural farm activity but more recently units have been established exclusively to produce fish and it has become a highly specialised business.

The Nephrops fishery “at the back of the Aran Islands” is the mainstay of the Ros a Mhíl fleet and sustaining this valuable fishery would be at the heart of any management plan for fisheries in the area. In 2006 the fifth in a series of annual UWTV survey was completed, and the results of that survey together with a synthesis and analysis of the results were published. The survey is multidisciplinary in nature collecting data on burrow abundances from UWTV, Nephrops biological data from beam trawls, oceanographic data from CTD, sediment data, multi-beam and other habitat data. A geostatistical analysis indicates that burrow densities and abundances have fluctuated considerably in space and time. Highest densities occurred in 2004 with the lowest densities in the 2006 survey. There may be a negative relationship between abundance in landings in the autumn and a positive relationship between observed densities and landings the following spring.

Since 2003 a joint UWTV survey has been carried out by the Marine Institute (Ireland) and AFBI (Northern Ireland). In 2009 this survey was used to develop catch options for the stock using a bias corrected survey estimate as an absolute measure of stock size and recent discard rates and mean weight to forecast catch (ICES, 2009a). This report details the results of the 2009 survey for the western Irish Sea Nephrops stock. We also update the catch option table using the most recent survey estimate.

A total of 2936 salmon were tagged at Carrigadroghid Co Cork in January 1973. From this tagging there were 34 recaptures, a return rate of 1.16%. In 1975 the number of salmon smolts tagged was 4860 and 18 were recovered, representing a return rate of 0.37%. Details of the recaptures resulting from these two tagging operations are given.

This is the fourth in a time series of UWTV surveys on the ‘Smalls grounds’. The 2006 survey covered the distinct mud patches of the Smalls Grounds and also indicator stations on the Labadie Bank, Nymphe Bank and Seven Heads, whereas the 2007 to 2009 survey covered the Smalls grounds only due to poor weather and time constraints. This report details the results of the 2009 survey for the Smalls ground Nephrops stock.

The prawn (Nephrops norvegicus) are common around the Irish coast occurring in geographically distinct sandy/muddy areas were the sediment is suitable for them to construct their burrows. The Irish Nephrops fishery is extremely valuable with landings in recent years worth around €30m at first sale supporting an important indigenous processing industry. The Nephrops fishery “at the back of the Aran Islands” can be considered the mainstay of the Ros a Mhíl fleet. Without this Nephrops fishery the majority of vessels in the fleet would cease being economically viable (Meredith, 1999). Given these socio-economic realities, good scientific information on stock status to enable sustainable management of the resources are urgently required. This is the eight data point in a time series of UWTV surveys on the ‘Aran grounds’. The survey covers three distinct mud patches; the Aran Ground, Galway Bay and Slyne Head. These have approximate areas of 940, 41 and 26sq.km respectively. In 2009 this survey was used to develop catch options for the stock using a bias corrected survey estimate as an absolute measure of stock size and recent discard rates and mean weight to forecast catch (ICES, 2009a). This report details the results of the 2009 survey and updates the catch option table using the most recent survey estimate.

Harvesting the commercially significant lobster, Nephrops norvegicus, is a multimillion dollar industry in Europe. Stock assessment is essential for maintaining this activity but it is conducted by manually inspecting hours of underwater surveillance videos. To improve this tedious process, we propose an automated procedure. This procedure uses mosaics for detecting the Nephrops, which improves visibility and reduces the tedious video inspection process to the browsing of a single image. In addition to this novel application approach, key contributions are made for handling the difficult lighting conditions in these kinds of videos. Mosaics are build using 1-10 minutes of footage and candidate Nephrops regions are selected using image segmentation based on local image contrast and colour features. A K-Nearest Neighbour classifier is then used to select the respective Nephrops from these candidate regions. Our final decision accuracy at 87.5% recall and precision shows a corresponding 31.5% and 79.4% improvement compared with previous work.