Fisheries

29 January 2019. By Voyage Leader Dr Richard O'Driscoll.

The Ross Sea Region Research and Monitoring Programme (Ross-RAMP) is a five-year research programme funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and run by NIWA to evaluate the effectiveness of the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area.

As a young child growing up on an Irish farm, one of Eimear Egan’s chores was to regularly clean out the well from where her family drew its drinking water. In the well lived a large eel that, no matter how many times it was shifted, just kept coming back.

Based at Bream Bay, Whangarei, Crispin Middleton is also an acclaimed underwater photographer and the recipient of numerous photography awards. His work regularly appears in New Zealand Geographic, dive magazines, scientific journals and conservation/ government documents.

The Ross Sea region is vital to the future of the Antarctic ecosystem.

The Fish Passage Assessment Tool has been developed to provide an easy to use, practical tool for recording instream structures and assessing their likely impact on fish movements and river connectivity.

NIWA researchers are out on the Hauraki Gulf this week to find out more about the nurseries of young snapper.

A chance find by a woman walking on a Northland beach is now helping scientists learn more about mako sharks.

Humans don't always make it easy on fish to get where they are going. New Zealand's first national set of Fish Passage Guidelines – co-developed by NIWA - is expected to help.

NIWA has developed a new method for spatially-explicit, quantitative, sustainability risk assessment of pelagic shark population.

Sharks are vulnerable to overfishing because of their low reproductive rates and often low growth rates. Most pelagic sharks fall near the middle of the shark productivity scale, and there is concern that catching too many of them could lead to population depletion. In New Zealand waters, mako sharks are the second most commonly caught shark species (after blue sharks) on tuna longlines.

Warrick Lyon is heading to the Marshall Islands to teach fisheries observers how to tag sharks.