A London-based conservation group Blue Ventures successfully demonstrated the positive effects of sustainable fishing in Madagascar, building hundreds of marine protect areas.
Typically, marine protected areas (MPAs) are imposed upon fishing communities without explaining the rationale behind the move or offering any form of compensation for a measure that often carries a short-term cost, which cash-strapped villagers in developing countries cannot afford.
All too often, this results in a standoff between well-meaning conservationists and the local communities they are trying to help.
By contrast, Dr Harris and his team work closely with often-suspicious local communities, typically using octopuses to win them over by demonstrating the power of conservation in a cheap and quick manner.
Octopuses are ideal for demonstration because they grow so rapidly. This means communities can quickly see – and profit – from closing off an area, to fishing for a short while to allow them to breed uninterrupted.
Closing off a quarter of an octopus fishing waters for just three months has been found to double their catch in that area by villages after it re-opened. The elevated catch will last for around two months before going back to the level before the project started.
Meanwhile, the real beauty of the scheme is that the total amount of octopus caught remains stable as fishermen are able to step up their catch in the other three quarters of the area. The villagers can cordon off each area twice a year, ensuring that their fish stocks are continually being rejuvenated, creating a sustainable environment for octopus gleaning.
After seeing the positive results, more coastal communities followed suit. There have been hundreds of replications of that model now around the coast of Madagascar. As a result, there are now over 100 locally managed marine protected areas that have been established and more ambitious than protected octopus. These include permanent marine reserves around important areas of coral reefs and mangrove and seagrass, covering 14.5 per cent of one of the biggest seabeds in Africa.
“We’re not primarily interested in conserving octopuses. We use the octopus as the catalyst to protect the broader eco-system. Seeing their rapid recovery allows us to start a conversation with locals that were previously totally opposed to, for instance, setting up a permanent marine reserve and that results in them setting up that permanent marine reserve,” Dr Harris says.
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Source: The Straits Times, 24 June 2017