Collaborative scientific research is essential to the sustainability of fisheries worldwide, and even more important in preserving the Seychelles outer islands for years to come. Last month Blue safari’s conservation manager attended the 11th World Recreational Fishing Congress, hosted in South Africa.
This event is integral to recreational fisheries research worldwide and allows the meeting of scientific minds, conservation practitioners, fisheries managers, policy makers and interested parties. The combination of these individuals is important to grow the understanding of recreational fisheries and allows for new and novel ideas to be formulated, and most importantly the sharing of knowledge. Although brief, Elle gave us a quick synopsis of her thoughts on the conference.
The collaborative research between Blue Safari, the Alphonse Foundation, ICS and long-term partners Drs Andy Danylchuk, Luke Griffin and Professor Steve Cooke were highlighted during two separate talks. One describing the overall contribution of the collaborative multi-species projects happening around the Alphonse Group to inform best-practice recreational fisheries management in order to safeguard this important low-impact Blue Economy activity. The second presentation deep-diving into the long-term mark-recapture study using PIT tags that we have been conducting at Alphonse since 2018 and what does a recapture rate of 6.7% mean in terms of a sustainable recreational fishery, population size and future management.
In addition to our work in Seychelles there were numerous researchers presenting their projects which either had results that could be applicable to recreational fisheries management in Seychelles or sparked informative debate around conservation issues and solutions within tourism-based recreational fisheries. The conference also allowed us to reconnect with some key long-term conservation partners Andy and Steve and Keep Fish Wet director Sascha Danylchuk, with some extremely valuable discussions on projects to come in the outer islands of the Seychelles. The further development of Seychelles-specific handling best-practice tools with Keep Fish Wet is one of the many new projects we look forward to getting stuck into.
Our African counterpart African Waters, through Keith Clover gave an insightful after dinner talk on the development of sustainable fly-fishing-based tourism in remote places across Africa. This talk amongst others also highlighted that the optimization of local economies in these truly remote places needs international investment and know-how.
All in all, it was extremely productive and informative conference, with many new ideas for constructive research and the formulation of multiple projects for years to come in the outer islands of the Seychelles, further preserving and protecting the fisheries. Keep informed or be involved in the work to come. Together, we project the future of recreational fisheries.
