The spearfisher who discovered a number of dead fish near Great Barrier Island says there needs to be tighter limits for commercial and recreational fishing.
A video posted to social media shows dead fish floating on top of the water.
Fisheries NZ has identified a vessel operating in the area and is investigating after receiving a complaint.
The spearfisherman who took the video, Darren Shields, said it’s not the first time he had seen something like that.
“I knew straight away what I was looking at,” he said.
Shields said he had seen a steady decline in fish stocks over the years.
“We never did something when it was time to do something,” he said.
“We’ve been allowed to take too much, recreationally and commercially, for too long…”
Shields said there needed to be more limits.
“The population is growing every year, and we’ve got more people going out on the water, wanting to catch a feed, which they should be able to, but we don’t need to be able to take as much.”
“Take a little bit less, allow for these extra people, get commercial better at what they’re doing so they’re not bottom trawling.”
Shields wanted to see a limit to fish added to the quota system.
“You don’t put it in the quota management system, you stop bottom trawling, so you stop the destruction of the bottom and the catching of undersized fish and fish that aren’t in the quota management system.”
“You fix the problem, you don’t add to the problem.”
Fisheries NZ regional manager Andre Espinoza said it was looking into whether any fisheries offence had occurred after receiving the complaint.
“Illegal discarding of fish from commercial vessels is relatively rare because of the prevalence of on-board cameras on many vessels and because we are able to track the movements of vessels in near real time. However, we do receive complaints from time to time and follow up on each on.”
Espinoza said they would review the vessel’s onboard camera footage, catch reporting and GPS vessel tracking.
Originally appearing on RNZ, written by ,
