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A study to record the wealth of knowledge possessed by fishermen
for the better management of fish stocks is underway on the
prawn grounds around the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.
The study, which is led by Dr Brendan Flynn comes under the
umbrella of the newly-formed Socio-Economic Marine Research
Unit (SEMRU) at NUI Galway.
The project is funded by the Marine Institute under the Sea
Change Programme also includes partners from the Marine Institute’s
Fisheries Science Services Team.
According to Edward Hind, a PhD student on the project, fishers
and scientists have not always agreed on the best ways of
sustainably managing fish stocks. As far back as the late
1800’s, fishermen working around the coast of Ireland were
already having concerns that stocks were showing depletion,
which was greeted with the response that these stocks were
'inexhaustible” by the great scientist Thomas Henry
Huxley in 1883.
More recently, fishermen were the first to notice a decline
in the cod stocks on the Grand Banks of Canada, but their
observations were disregarded by fisheries managers of the
time. “We founded the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association
because nobody was listening to the fishermen,” said fisherman
Sam Lee. “We were complaining to the wind.”
Edward Hind points out that, while the Grand Banks fishers’
information was ignored in the 1970s, studies since
then have shown these fishers did indeed have unique ecological
knowledge about the fishery that the operated in.
“The goal of the Irish Fishers’ Knowledge Project,” says
Hind, “is to investigate the knowledge which Irish fishermen
have that could potentially be utilised in Irish/European
fisheries management. "So far, we have found that Irish
fishermen have potentially unique knowledge, not only of ecological
conditions, but also of the social and economic environment
in which they live. They also have many ideas that could shape
marine policy and management.”
Hind and other members of the team have been working in the
Galway and Aran fisheries for over a year, talking to individual
fishers for up to four hours at a time to learn about the
history of the boats the fishers work on , the type of gear
they use and their target species. They have also asked fishermen
to draw the locations of fishing grounds on Admiralty charts
and to indicate when fishing occurs on different areas of
the ground and what changes might have occurred over time
on these grounds.
Already the project has unearthed interesting views and observations
on the behaviour of the fleet, the economic pressures that
the fleet operates under and the preferred solutions to different
problems that fishermen currently experience.
Fishing strategy seems to be linked to the degree to which
a fisherman has invested in capital. Fishermen with high investments
have no option but to fish for volume, while others have adopted
a strategy of fishing for value and have scaled down investment
and reduced costs to do so. Unearthing these strategies which
evolve in response to difficult market conditions is useful
in formulating management strategies for the fishery.
Additional work is starting under this project to study cod
fisheries in the Celtic Sea. The Fisher’s Tacit Knowledge
Project is funded by the Marine Institute through the NDP
Marine Research Sub-Programme under the national marine research
strategy Sea Change.
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