Introduction

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Word on the Race. I'm your host, Sarah, and Marine Conservationist, Tanya Murphy. And with me, as always, is Kent Aquarium's Marine Educator and FitzWhisperer, Fred Whisper.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Good morning, Contact. I'm glad you had a nice time though. Yeah, it was a bit chilly.

SPEAKER_03 1:23

Yeah, well, it was chilly here as well. It got down to something like 17 degrees, which is a very good thing. Now, for to start off our story today, I have some positive news. Scientists doing surveys on an increase reef in Western Australia have discovered a section which was able to withstand last year's devastating bleaching effect. The Hookman Abrus Island, 60 kilometers off the coast of Geralton, was found to have experienced minimal bleaching, while other sections of WA's race were quite devastated by the extreme heat wave last year. Dr. Kate Quigley, who I interviewed on this podcast way back in season one, led the research and said studying what makes those corals at Orolith so resilient could help us understand how we can help protect other reefs from future bleaching events. Yes, Dr. Quigley said, quote, it really shows us that there's a lot of incredible reef worth protecting and it's still out there. I think it's important to let people know that the fight's not over, and if we act on climate change now, we'll be able to save incredible places like this.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 2:35

So that's some positive news to start our day.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

That's good. Yes. Alright.

SPEAKER_03 2:38

But on to today's topic, and an important one for seafood lovers fishing on the Great Barrier Reef. Now, if you love eating seafood, don't worry. I'm not going to tell you that you have to give up your favourite genre of food. But hopefully, this episode will empower you to make sustainable choices by exploring things like where did your fish come from? What methods are they used to catch it? Is it sustainable? And what alternatives are there? First, we'll dive into the Great Barrier Reef coral harvest industry. How much coral is being chipped off the Great Barrier Reef and exported for the international aquarium trade? To unpack these questions, our guest today is Simon Miller, Great Barrier Reef Fisheries Campaign Manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Good morning, Simon, and welcome to Word on the Reef.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Hey, Tanya Ambrett, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

Good morning, Simon. Thanks for joining us, buddy.

SPEAKER_03 3:32

It's great to have you on the show. Before we dive into the Great Barrier Reef Fisheries, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your background and how you came to be passionate about the ocean?

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah, sure. So I grew up splitting time between the UK and Central Queensland coast. And so, yeah, I can still vividly remember what kicked it off for me kind of going out to Heron Island for the first time in the mid-90s as a 10-year-old kid and just being absolutely mesmerized by the colours and sounds and and everything you see underwater. They're absolutely incredible place and still is. And so that's that's always kind of what I point to that kicked it off for me. I've been working in this space now for about 15 years in conservation and fisheries. A bit more than half of that with a focus on the Great Barrow Reef, working with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, as I now do, and previously before that with WWF. But I've also worked as a fisheries manager in New South Wales and with smaller conservation organizations overseas. So one of my first jobs in this field was in Cambodia doing reef surveys to set up Cambodia's first marine park.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah, really amazing experience.

SPEAKER_03 4:55

Wow, it all sounds great. I haven't been to Cambodia yet, but we'll add that to our bucket club. And uh I'm I'm jealous that you got to go to Heron Island when you're a child because I went a couple of years ago and it was absolutely incredible place. I can only imagine how healthy it would have been back then as well.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_03 5:12

Now, let's talk about Great Barrier Reef fisheries. Many people, especially international tourists, are surprised when they learn that any fishing is allowed on the Great Barrier Reef, since it is a marine park and a World Heritage Area. How much fishing still happens on the Great Barrier Reef and whereabouts?

SPEAKER_00 5:29

So the Great Barrier Reef is probably Australia's most famous marine park, and it's it's one of our, if not the best managed within Australia itself. But all marine parks in Australia are multi-use marine parks, which means uh, of course, you can do different things in different zones. And so while we've got one-third of the Great Barra Reef fully protected in marine sanctuaries, which are vital to protect that biodiversity, we've also got two-thirds that's open to some form of fishing. And so fishing is the largest extractive use in the Great Barrow Reef. And when we talk about fishing, there's a few different types of fishing. We've got commercial fishing, and there's all different types of commercial fishing, which I'm sure we'll explore a bit more today. And we've got recreational fishing, which is obviously really important to many people in terms of the lifestyle and why we love living in Queensland. And then there's also First Nations cultural fishing, there's charter fishing. So there's a few different types of fishing. But when we think about some of the biggest sustainability issues, inevitably they tend to be commercial fishing issues.

SPEAKER_03 6:40

Yes, we have many friends who own boats and like to go out spear fishing or throw a line in and catch a fish for the family, but they are also big marine conservation advocates. So the the two things are not mutually exclusive. No, that's right.

Prawn Trawling

SPEAKER_03 6:54

Let's talk about trawling. What is trawling in Queensland context? What are they fishing for and what are the impacts?

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Yeah, so trawlers are boats that tow relatively large nets behind them, either along the seafloor or you can have trawling in kind of midwater as well to catch different species. Now, in Queensland, all of our trawling is for prawns, and so there's a number of different prawn species that are targeted that live in different areas of Queensland. Now, trawling is a high impact and a high-risk fishery, and there's a few distinct issues with it that need to be managed for it to be able to occur sustainably. So obviously, when you're running nets along the seabed, there's a risk of habitat damage and scraping up things that you shouldn't be scraping up off the bottom. And so the first thing we need to make sure we're trawling is that it's not happening within sensitive areas. So it wants to be happening away from coral reefs, away from sponge gardens and seagrass beds. For trawling to not have really serious impacts on the bottom, it needs to be conducted over sand and mud. Now, in Queensland, fortunately, the bulk of trawling is occurring in those kind of sandy and muddy lagoon areas because that's where they find the prawns that they're trying to catch. And the footprint of trawling has has reduced quite a lot. When I say footprint, I mean the area that's being trawled. So when we think back to I mean, trawling in the 60s, the 70s, 80s, 90s, late last century, trawling was huge in Queensland. There was more than a thousand boats, 1,500 boats over quite a large area within the Great Barra Reef.

SPEAKER_03 8:47

Yeah, it was more than 95% of the Great Barry Reef was open to commercial fishing up until 2004, and a lot of that was being taken advantage of. So it would, you know, if you looked historically, uh I'd hate to see an image if such a thing could be traced back of every footprint of every trawl path that had ever been on the reef. It would probably colour in the entire area.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

That'd be terrifying. Yeah, so I mean a lot, a lot has changed since then, which is of course a good thing. So we've got the marine park protection sort of been put in place. And trawlers themselves have done a lot of things. One of the things they do these days is what's called line trawling. And so they they essentially run their boat up and down the very same path rather than going in different ways. Because once you trawl it and you somewhat disturb that seabed and the mud gets kicked up, the prawns actually move into that area to feed. So if they come back over the exact same path, they catch more prawns the second and third time they run along it. And that's obviously beneficial in terms of reducing the footprint. But for traoling to be sustainable, we need to be making sure that vulnerable areas are protected from traoling and it's not occurring near reefs and sponges and things like that.

SPEAKER_03 9:59

Yeah, we did an entire episode back in season two with Imogen Zethoven, and then that's when we were talking about the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef in 2004, which reduced the amount of area that was open to fishing on the Great Barrier Reef. So for any listeners that are interested, check it out at wordontheef.com. We've got that whole history of that battle to get those no fishing zones expanded on the Great Barrier Reef. But what are some other practices that can help make trawling more sustainable? I'm thinking about devices on the boats as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

That's right. So this is one of the areas that both AMCS and the trawl industry have been focusing a bit of attention in the last couple of years. So the other major impact from trawling is around the bycatch and in particular the bycatch of threatened species. So on the Great Barrel Reef, we've got incredible diversity of sea snakes. We've got, I think, 16 species of sea snakes that live within the Great Barrel Reef World Heritage Area. And so unfortunately, sea snakes are a common bycatch. We're talking probably in the region of around 20,000 sea snakes a year being caught. Wow. And depending on when they're caught and where they're caught, they can suffer quite high mortality because they get crushed or spiked and injured within these nets. And if they're in the net too long, they can drown as well because they're air-breathing reptiles. So one of the things that we've been working on, and we're just getting the final results through actually expecting a final report in the next month or so, is around what's called bycatch reduction devices. And so these are things that you can put in a traw net to help the bicatch escape. And so there's one that we've been trialing called Tom's Fisheye, which goes in the top of the trawlnet. And basically that helps sea snakes as well as fish and other things escape out of the net alive before they're brought to the surface. And the trials that we've been seeing of these devices have seen between a 25 and 65% reduction in sea snake catch.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Wow, that's good.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

So particularly if you're at the upper end of that, if you're reducing your catch of sea snakes by two-thirds, uh, that's a really positive outcome. And so those are just being introduced as an approved device to use in Queensland, and we'll see that final report in the next few weeks, which we'll be looking forward to.

SPEAKER_03 12:38

Well, that's exciting development.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

It really is.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

Will that be made compulsory, do you think, or is it the industry's choosing to you utilize that?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

So at the moment, fishers have a choice as to which bycatch reduction devices they can use. They have a choice of about, I think it's about four or five approved devices. This one will be added to that list. What we would like to see is that be at the expense of less effective bycatch reduction devices. There's no point doing all this work to design and approve a more effective device for fishers not to then put it in their nets.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

Yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

So we of course need to incentivize that. And my understanding is that the federal government have got some grants and funding available to help the port fishers put these devices in their nets because it obviously comes at a cost as well to make these things. And so, yeah, we're still working on this behind the scenes, but yeah, we're really hopeful that these new devices will replace the older, less effective ones, and we can see a reduction in those sea snakes that are being caught.

SPEAKER_03 13:44

Amazing. Yeah, we already know historically that devices called TEDs, turtle exclusion devices, resulted in a huge decrease in the number of turtles that were being caught in nets. And they've been in use for quite a while now, and it's it's just been those smaller bycatch things like sea snakes that were still getting trapped, and it's really good to see that the technology's advancing to the point where we can start to release those sea snakes as well. Yeah, sorry, I think I interrupted you. What other devices are there?

SPEAKER_00 14:13

I'm glad you brought up TEDs because that was the other thing I was going to mention. So those turtle excluder devices have been incredible for turtles and reducing the catch of turtles and increasing their survival. And so to just explain what a TED is, if you can kind of imagine a diagonal metal grid in the net that either points upwards or downwards, with metal bars that are about, at the moment they're normally about 12 centimetres apart. So you can't physically fit a turtle between that grid. And what it then does is it swims up or down, depending on which way that diagonal grid is pointing, and out of a hole in the net. Because of that bar spacing, what that also means is any larger animals like sharks or things like that that might inadvertently get caught in the traw also can't fit through that grid and can also escape. But one of the problems that we have seen, particularly in some deeper water areas of the Great Bear Reef, where we have a bunch of endemic sharks and rays, they're species that aren't found anywhere else in the world. And to be honest, we don't know a whole heap about some of these species. They're a bit smaller, a bit more squishy in some cases, and can actually fit through those bars still. And so we've also been doing some work, and the fishing industry has been doing some work to look at different bar spacing, so to reduce the gap between those bars in the TED so that we're not catching these smaller, more flexible sharks and rays. So we're also seeing some progress in that space as well, which is really good. Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

And what about cameras on troll boats? That's something that I've seen in the news a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Yeah. Exactly. So this is something we've been campaigning on for a number of years because one of the problems we've had in Queens and Fisheries historically and on the Great Barrier Reef is that fishers haven't always been accurately reporting their bycatch. And so we just haven't got reliable data on how many threatened species are really being interacted with. And if you don't know how many are being caught and how many are dying, then it's really hard to conserve these species and help their populations recover.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

So as a first step, we need to collect that data better. In the case of the truol fishery, the most cost-effective way to do that is by putting cameras on the boats. And so as of January this year, the Queensland government committed to rolling out cameras on boats that represent about 90% of the fishing effort in the troll fishery. So all of the most active boats are going to be getting cameras commencing from June this year.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

And how did that go down with most of the trawler companies? Did they get any pushback from that or was it just all welcomed with open arms?

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Oh, there's certainly been pushback over the years, but this is something we've been discussing with the industry and government since 2018.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

So it's been pretty slow progress to get to this point where the Queensland government's actually committed to rolling it out, and the rollout will start next month within the next few weeks.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Gee, that's great. But I mean at the end of the day, it's beneficial to the trawler fishermen. Do you know what I mean? Protecting these species and protecting that food line and you know, it's it's all bonuses. If we've got nothing to hide, then just chuck the cameras on there.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Exactly. This is the thing. And that's going to help their social license long term as well. Like I mean, everyone recognises that they're working within a highly biodiverse World Heritage Area. And so for a practice like this that is high risk to continue to operate into the future, there needs to be that transparency that consumers can know what the impact is and that scientists know, well, what species are being impacted and how much of their being impacted so that we can make sure that we can help their population to recover.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

And and I and I see this from my customers at work. Quite often I'll get people come up to me after my shows and go, look, that was really good we learned so much, but we do enjoy seafood. Is there somewhere we can go or something we can do so that we feel better about what we're purchasing at seafood restaurants and seafood suppliers? And there's there is that website, Goodfish, isn't there?

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Yeah, that's

How to Choose Sustainable Seafood

SPEAKER_00 18:25

right. So at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, we also run Goodfish. So that's goodfish.org.au and what goodfish does is we do independent sustainability reviews of commonly found seafood in Australia. Yep. And ultimately we look at the population of the fish, making sure it's healthy. We look at whether there's bycatch and whether that's having an impact on threatened species population. And we look at how the fishery is managed. Is it managed to a kind of world's best practice standards? And something that we can be proud of as Australians and is genuinely sustainable. And what we then do is we turn that into a simple traffic life system. So red is say no. So these are fish that have got serious sustainability concerns about them. Yellow or amber means eat less. So this is something you can eat on occasion, but there's still some sustainability concerns. And if there's a better choice, a green option, we'd always encourage a consumer to choose that. And so we do this for fish caught and farmed, both in aquaculture as well, in Queensland and all around Australia. It includes all of the most popular table species, stuff like barramundi, Spanish mackerel stuff you're going to find in your fish and chip shop, but also some of the less commonly found species that if you're a Spiro or you're out fishing on the reef and you're wondering how sustainable something is, you can have a quick look at the Good Fish Guide and that'll give you a bit of an overview as to whether that's a good one to keep or not.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

Yeah, well, it's been a very helpful website. I mean I get I mention in my turtle tours every day and at the end of my shows, if you want to learn more, go into Goodfish and people come up and go, that's really helpful for them because the pardon the pun, the tide's changing in the way people are thinking. You know, they want to be able to sustain and look after this natural gift that we have out there, that great barrier reef. So this is a good way of doing it.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

Yeah, so which prawns can people eat that get a green light on good fish?

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yeah, so at the moment uh queens and prawns all have a red rating because there are concerns around the bycatch of these threatened species. And until this point, we haven't had accurate data on those interactions. Hopefully that will change over the next year or two as we do see these cameras rolled out onto the boats and these new bycatch reduction devices start to reduce the catch of those threatened species. So I'm hopeful that will change in the future, but for now we recommend that people avoid wildcaught Queensland prawns. The sustainable options, we do also have farmed prawns in Queensland that are coming out of aquaculture, and also those farmed elsewhere in Australia. Those currently have a green rating. So we recommend people to choose Australian farmed prawns. And if you're looking for a wild core option, the one wildcaught green-listed prawn fishery that we've got in Australia is from South Australia, the Spencer Gulf Western King prawn, which might be a little harder to find in North Queensland. So probably your farmed prawns are your best option.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

Amazing information for anyone who's planning a barbecue this weekend so we can throw another prawn.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

I'm so glad you didn't go straight. We couldn't be friends anymore if you did that.

SPEAKER_03 21:47

Throw another prawn on the Barbie.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

Another prawn.

Gill Net Fishing

SPEAKER_03 21:54

Simon, let's talk about gillnets. What are gillnets and what are their impacts inside the Great Barrel Reef Marine Park?

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Yeah, so gillnets are large meshnets that are used to catch species like barramundi, king threadfin, grey mackerel, species like that in North Queensland. Historically, it's been a reasonably large fishery on the Great Barrow Reef. But the problem with gill nets is that they're very good at catching fish, but unfortunately also very effective at catching threatened species like jugongs, turtles, sawfish in particular, if they're not well used. And so That's been a really big focus of mine and of ours as an organisation to reduce the impact of this fishery in such a special place like the Great Barrier Reef.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

It's incredible. I think they have gill nets near our Cairns and near Port Douglas, areas where tourists are coming from all over the world, spending big money to sea turtles and and other animals. So I was pretty surprised the first time I found out that they could get caught in these nets. But AMCS and many other organizations have been campaigning for a long time for the Queensland and Australian governments to ban gill net fishing in Queensland. And congratulations, it's ultimately been successful. So can you tell us about that campaign? How did you do it?

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Well done. Thank you. I mean, we had evidence from concerned members of the public over a number of years of a lot of these threatened species wrapped up and drowned in gill nets. And it was really sad. I mean, I remember being sent a video from the Hay Point Coal Terminal a few years back of a gill net that had at least seven or eight turtles holding it. And the fisher, probably asleep on his boat out at sea, the tide had gone so far down that the net was dry on the beach. The tide had gone down below it, and you can see these turtles wrapped up in the net. And it's a 600-meter net, and the camera just kept panning and panning and panning, going on and on, and you just see one turtle after another. And so we had this kind of library of evidence of these threatened species interactions and a whole bunch of dead animals that really shouldn't be caught and dying in these nets in the World Heritage Area. And if you think back to uh what, 2022, I think it was, we had a UNESCO and IUCN reactive monitoring mission that came out to the reef to understand the reef's management and make recommendations on things that needed to improve to help the Great Barra Reef avoid an endangered thing. And one of their priority recommendations was to phase out the use of gill net on the Great Barrel Reef. And so thanks to that and the campaign that we were running at the time, in mid-2023, the Queensland and Australian governments committed to remove gill nets completely from the Great Barrel Reef. So we had nearly 240 GillNet licenses as of the start of 2024. That was reduced down to about 30 licenses. And I think we've now got the final, I think there's about 25 GillNet licenses that are still operating on the Great Bat Reef, but that will end in June 2027. So these transitional arrangements end in about a year, and from that point onwards there will be no more gill net fishing.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

Oh hooray. Well done. That's great.

SPEAKER_03 25:41

It's good news for turtles and jiggongs. How are all the fishing people feeling about all of that? Have they got other alternatives to move to?

SPEAKER_00 25:49

That's what's being worked on at the moment. So of course, when that announcement was first made, there was a lot of frustration from the fishing industry, anger, and disappointment. But I think we've largely moved past a lot of that now. One of the commitments that the government at the time made was to trial alternative fishing gears that could sustainably catch barramundi threadfin, these same species that gill nets catch, but without the impact on threatened species. So those trials are ongoing at the moment. There are some concerns being voiced about some of them, tunnel nets in particular, which are another large type of net. The impact on threatened species is lower, but the concern is predominantly coming from the recreational sector because tunnel nets aren't as effective at catching barramundi and catch a lot of recreationally important species, things like Travallis, Golden Travali, Giant Travalli, and also permits. So these really important recreational species that don't have a particularly high commercial value. So there's still a few things to work through as to what an alternative fishing gear looks like. The really obvious one is line fishing. Line fishing, very selective, very sustainable, no impact on threatened species. And so that's the kind of direction we're hoping things are heading.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

Yeah, and for consumers, we also have a growing aquaculture industry for barramundi. So people can still get barramundi from aquaculture sources. I think that industry is sort of growing as well, from what I hear.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Right. Yep.

Coral Harvesting

SPEAKER_03 27:29

Now, Simon, last week in the Sydney CBD, a group of people dressed up as colourful corals put on a performance for lunchtime crowds. Comedian Kirsty Weebek, an ocean lover who joined us on our show last season, was auctioning off these corals to bemused passers-by. Can you tell us what that performance was all about?

SPEAKER_00 27:51

That performance was fantastic. It was absolutely incredible. But although it kind of brought the colour and the humour to Sydney's CBD, it was to highlight a really important issue around the Queens and coral fishery. So the coral fishery that operates on the Great Barrel Reef is the largest in Australia. Fishers can take up to 190 tons of corals a year. And Australia is the second biggest player in the global coral trade behind only Indonesia. And so the vast majority of the corals that are being taken from the Great Barra Reef are then being sold off internationally, basically, to go into people's home aquariums. And when we think about the threats to the Great Barrel Reef, of course, climate change is by far the biggest issue here. But when we are seeing our corals devastated by mass bleaching events, by cyclones, by the flooding that we've seen as well in recent years. But then on top of that, we're actively taking the healthy, resilient corals that are surviving these events and selling them off for private profit so they can be sold into people's home aquariums, is an issue that really flies under the radar. Not many people know about it. And I think if more Australians knew, they'd be pretty shocked and appalled that this occurs on the Great Barrier River.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 29:15

Yeah, I was surprised about that amount when I first heard it. I think some people might argue that these corals, given all of the bleaching impacts that you just mentioned, that these corals might actually be safer held in people's aquariums, that they might be safe keeping them. But we know that all the corals are vital for the functioning of the whole of the Great Barry Reef. They're part of the ecosystem. What evidence do you have that coral harvest is having an impact on the reef?

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Yeah, so that's a really important point. Yes, of course, having corals in aquariums, both people's home aquariums and also large public displays, is important to help teach people about the beauty and biodiversity of the reef. But corals provide such an important function for our Great Barrier Reef. I mean, hard corals in particular, they're the backbone. They provide the structure for thousands of other species. So if we lose our corals, we don't just lose the corals themselves, we lose all the other species that depend on the corals. And that would be devastating. And so when we look at the sustainability of this harvest, yes, 190 tons in years gone by might be a drop in the ocean because the Great Barrel Reef is obviously a very large ecosystem, covers a huge area. But some of those corals are found nowhere else on Earth. And they're naturally rare. We're not talking about things like the branching Acropora corals that are found on most reefs throughout the Great Barra Reef. These are small, unique, naturally rare occurring, colourful corals that are being taken. And so there's been some recent studies that have looked at the sustainability of this fishery, one of them looking at some of those more unique and rare corals done by Dr. Morgan Pratchett.

SPEAKER_03 31:06

Who we've had on this show before. Yes. But the last time we talked to him, it was about Cots, but he's very prolific. And yes, I know he's done a lot of research and he's very passionate about the coral fishery issue as well.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

Yeah, that's right. So what Morgan's work was doing was basically looking at some of these speciality corals in fished areas versus unfished areas. And what he found was for some of those high value species that are also rare and found nowhere else, their densities and abundance were considerably lower in those fished areas than they were in the protected areas. And so there is concerns that fishing is leading to lower populations of those species, but we just don't have the evidence base for most corals. Like we don't know exactly where many of them are found or information on their populations that we can say confidently that this is sustainable or unsustainable. And so what you have to do is if you want to prove something is sustainable, you need to do that work, which is very expensive. But you need to do it regularly as well, because if you have a mass bleaching event like we did a couple of years ago, the 2024 mass bleaching event, where on some sectors of the reef we lost 40% of our coral cover. Well, if fishers aren't taking the dead corals, they don't have any value. They're taking the live, healthy, resilient ones that are surviving those events. So not only are you impacting the reef's ability to recover, but you're also taking corals on top of what has already died through climate change and things like that.

SPEAKER_03 32:46

Imagine being a coral, you've just survived the world's worst ever coral bleaching event, and then that happens next.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Yeah, here comes Tony with his big hook.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

Oh, it's my unlucky day.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

Is there is there certain areas that are set aside for this happening, or are people just going out there in their tinny and just filling their boat up with these beautiful corals?

SPEAKER_00 33:07

So there's just over 50 licenses at the moment, and they have to be licensed by both the Queens and government and permitted by the Australian government to operate.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Okay, and how's that how's that governed? Like you've you've got 50 licenses, you've got these people going out, they collect the coral. Is there someone checking on how much they've got when they get back? Is there a ways of of monitoring this, or are they just given the license and they go out and we just go, yeah, okay, that's how much you've taken?

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Yeah, so for each individual species there's a catch limit.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

And for some of those, fishes basically compete with each other to take it as quickly as they can. And others they own a certain chunk of the pie. So let's say the catch limit is five times, you might own one ton of it. So you can go out and take that one ton whenever you like. And if you want more, you've got to buy it from someone else. Like you've got to buy catch quota from someone else.

SPEAKER_02 34:00

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

So there are limits in place, and maybe it's monitoring, but those limits have been set based on historical fishing effort rather than on historical catches, rather than on any evidence of sustainability. And the period that that was based on of historical catches was actually a period of really rapid growth in fishery in the late 2010s. And so this is what we're concerned about that there's these rarer high-value species that are being selectively harvested that are found nowhere else on earth that there are some very real sustainability concerns for.

SPEAKER_03 34:40

It's driven by demand for the most rare and colourful corals. And collectors want to have in their living room aquarium the most rare and colourful species, and that's what is fetching the most money, I guess. And some of those rare species were depicted in those costumes at that colourful event you had in Sydney, which were really cool.

The Push to Ban Coral Harvest

SPEAKER_03 35:01

So which countries are taking most of our corals?

SPEAKER_00 35:05

Yeah, so as I said, so we're the second biggest player in the global coral trade behind Indonesia. We represent about a third of the corals that are traded globally. Now, of those corals that we're exporting, and the bulk are coming from the GBR, there's some very small coral fishery in the Northern Territory, and one in Western Australia too, but the bulk, very vast majority, are coming from the Great Barrier Reef. About half go to the United States. They're by far the biggest importer of our corals.

SPEAKER_02 35:35

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

And then the rest go to other developed, typically wealthy countries. Places like Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea tend to be big importers of our corals. And historically, it's been the United Kingdom and European Union as well. But very interestingly, in the last kind of five years or so, both the UK and European Union have put import bans on a number of our corals from the Great Barrier Reef because they're concerned about the sustainability of the harvest from the reef.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Wow, imagine that. The EU's more concerned about the Great Barrier Reef than than our own country. In some regards, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

That's exactly it. I mean, they have banned buying our corals, yet we will still happily sell them to anyone that will take them. They're more concerned about the sustainability of this coral harvest than we are. I find that really concerning.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

That's a red flag.

SPEAKER_03 36:35

The other thing that's ironic is that there's a lot of coral restoration happening on the reef where people are going out there planting one coral at a time. But up until recently, I believe the amount that was being taken by the harvest was more than what all these volunteers and NGOs are planting. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 36:54

That is right, and and still is. So coral restoration and those kinds of initiatives probably will play an important role in helping the Great Barrier Reef to recover into the future. So I don't want to discount those efforts from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and others that are working hard in that space. But it is kind of ironic, and this actually came out in the Commonwealth Government Centre estimates earlier this week because the Greens were asking questions of the Australian Environment Minister about this programme, and it came out that so far about $200 million has been spent on reef restoration attempts for essentially trying to get heat tolerant and healthy corals back out there on the reef. So on one hand, you're spending $200 million of funds to try and improve the health of the Great Barra Reef. Yet on the other hand, you're allowing fishes to take up to 190 tons, which is hundreds of thousands of corals a year being taken directly off the Great Barra Reef.

SPEAKER_02 37:57

It just makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 37:59

It doesn't really add up. This is government math, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 38:03

Yeah, and I can tell that there's quite a number of our amazing listeners that sit in and listen to us every Friday just sitting there shaking their heads right now. I mean this is it's just ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But the more we shake our heads, the more we can poke at the government and go, listen, you need to change this.

SPEAKER_03 38:21

So you said that the EU won't buy Australian corals. And isn't it the case that many countries have also got ahead of us and stopped the wild harvest of corals?

SPEAKER_00 38:32

Yeah, that's right. A number of countries with significant reef systems, Belize, Fiji, Thailand, have all banned the sale of wild harvested corals. Indonesia, who is the biggest player in the coral trade, they represent about 50% of corals traded globally, have put really severe restrictions on the wild harvest. And these days most of the coral coming out of Indonesia is from what's called mariculture, which is essentially coral farming but in the water. And so if those countries developing typically developing countries with nowhere near the sort of wealth that we've got in Australia can do it, why can't we?

SPEAKER_03 39:16

Well, yeah. It's a very good point. And an interesting point, actually, uh, because uh a couple of weeks ago we had a guest on the show from Ames, Libby Evans Ilidge, and she was talking about how vital it is to get express permission from traditional owners, even just to uh do a restoration project where you might take a coral or spawn from one part of the Great Barrier Reef and move it to a different part of the Great Barrier Reef. If you're moving it from one sea country into another sea country, even within Queensland, then the traditional owners need to be involved because that's not something that they would normally do only for very special restoration purposes. Would this be considered correct? Have you had any feedback from traditional owners about how they feel about their corals being shipped overseas?

SPEAKER_00 40:06

Not specifically about overseas, but the take of their coral from their sea country full stop. These are still ongoing conversations that we're having, of course, to see a diversity of opinion as well amongst different First Nations communities. But what we have heard from a couple, including in some public forums, is some real concern from First Nations communities about the take of coral, which is obviously plays an important part in some First Nations cultures and stories as well. So, yeah, we've definitely heard concern there as well.

The Aquaculture Solution

SPEAKER_03 40:44

What is the solution to the problem?

SPEAKER_00 40:47

Yeah, so as I kind of touched on a bit with just talking about Indonesia just there, the good thing here is that we do have a solution available and it already exists. We can shift this from a wild harvest fishery where the fishes are literally chipping off corals with a hammer and chisel from the Great Bear Reef. We can shift it to aquaculture. Corals are grown in tanks, they're held in aquariums. Most fishes already have some kind of on land facilities where they either store the corals prior to sale or in some cases break the corals up into smaller pieces, which is called fragging, and then grow them out until they're a sellable size. So most fishes already have these kinds of facilities. What we want to see is the Australian government provide the support that the industry needs to help them transition from wild harvest into aquaculture. We want to see these same businesses still existing. They play an important role as well in these reef restoration initiatives because they've got so much knowledge about growing the coals in tanks already. They're going to play a key role. So we still want these businesses to exist. We know that people having home aquariums is also really important for helping those former love for the reef that don't live near the ocean. So we still want the trade to exist. We just want to make sure that the coal is being grown in aquaculture facilities, not being taken from the Great Barra Reef. So we are looking for the government to support that transition to take place as rapidly as possible.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

Yeah, so we're talking about fragmenting, fragging, which is just using the corals that are already in captivity and breaking them into pieces, which then grow, and perhaps spawning them in captivity as well, and needing more bigger tanks and equipment for all of that. It is a bit of a cost for the industry, and I suppose that's one thing that's sort of slowing down that transition. And and I guess that is why you're asking for more government support to fast track that transition, right?

SPEAKER_00 42:51

That's right. I mean, the way I think about this is if you take a step back and you look at the trajectory that we're on with the Great Barrel Reef with climate change, we're gonna have increasing frequency and intensity of these mass bleaching events. And so the coral fishery, if you if everyone stood back and did nothing about this, in ten years' time the coral fishery wouldn't look like it does now, simply because we're gonna see changes in what the Great Barrel Reef looks like under our current trajectory. So either we can sit back and do nothing and a bunch of these businesses will go out of business by themselves because they just won't be able to harvest what they do now. Or the government can provide this support, be that logistical to help them expand their onshore facilities, or whether it's research to help them be able to, as you say, spawn and help the sexual reproduction of those corals, so you get thousands of corals at once. To help these businesses to transition. Basically, instead of having a bumpy road, we can smooth that pathway and make it a lot easier for everyone so that we keep these jobs in our regions in Queensland, we keep the trade going, but we make sure it's sustainable and we keep those healthy, resilient, beautiful corals out there on the reef where they belong.

SPEAKER_03 44:07

It's always a win-win when you do the right thing.

SPEAKER_02 44:10

Oh, there you go. There's a new slogan for us.

SPEAKER_03 44:13

Now, Simon, you've been encouraging ocean lovers to write to Federal Environment Minister Murray What about this issue. What has been his response?

SPEAKER_00 44:22

So interestingly, he was asked a question during a press conference in Cairns on the same day that we were holding this event down in Sydney. And I mean the minister's response was largely around reef restoration initiatives. It wasn't really focused on the coral fishery. This is an ongoing conversation we're having with the government and with fishers themselves. Ultimately, for this to work best, everyone needs to be pushing in the same direction. We are seeing concern from scientists, from conservationists, from the Australian public about this practice. And so we do hope that the Australian Environment Minister Murray Watts is going to step in and provide that support for the industry to transition.

SPEAKER_03 45:10

Where can listeners head to find out more about this campaign and take action?

SPEAKER_00 45:14

Yeah, so two options. Probably the easiest is by Googling End Coral Harvesting. And the first thing that's going to come up there will take you to our webpage on the Australian Marine Conservation Society's website. There's a very simple action there, which you can add your name to in less than 30 seconds, that will send an email to Minister Watt, basically urging him to help this fishery to transition. And I'd yeah really encourage all the listeners out there that are concerned about this as an issue to take that action. And there's some more information on our website as well.

SPEAKER_03 45:49

Awesome. Sadly, that's all we have time for today. Simon Miller, Great Barrier Reef Fisheries Campaign Manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Thanks for all your amazing work and thanks for joining us on Word on the Reef today.

SPEAKER_02 46:03

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 46:05

And thanks to you, all our listeners for joining us on Word on the Reef.