Monitoring the recovery of exploited deep-water species

Abstract

Commercial fisheries for deep-water species off the Irish coast developed in the late 1990s and declined in the early 2000s. Many of the exploited stocks were depleted a result of commercial exploitation and ICES has advised a zero catch for Orange Roughy since 2004, and for Portuguese Dogfish and Leafscale Gulper shark since 2005. Since 2016, the deep water access regulation has effectively banned trawling in waters deeper than 800 m (EC, 2016) and fishing for deep-water sharks with static netting >600 m is also banned by the technical measures regulation (EC, 2019). However, some of these species continue to be caught, either by gears not covered by this regulation or in water <800 m deep. The Marine Institute carried out a survey programme to assess the distribution and abundance of these species between 1992 and 1999 and again between 2006 and 2009. Since 2019, 3 days of the Irish Anglerfish and Megrim Survey have been allocated to monitoring the recovery of commercial deep-water species. This work was funded under the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) from 2019 to 2021 and European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund (EMFAF) since 2022. The main objective of the current project is to assess the recovery of exploited deep-water species in Irish waters by comparing the results from 2019 to 2022 surveys with those from the previous period in 2006 to 2009 (methods used in the earlier period 1992 to 1999 were different, therefore a direct comparison with that period is not possible).