Listen Up! Line Fish and Intertidal Resources Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The parlous state of line fish has been mostly ignored for over 40 years. Despite his three score years and ten as a commercial and recreational fisherman, Jack Walsh, like so many of his generation, says nobody listens to him. These fishermen of old have so much knowledge and experience at their fingertips, but this is simply overlooked by today’s scientists and management of the fisheries who would benefit from their expertise.

Like Al Gore’s warning about climate change all those years ago, Jack Walsh says unless visible and practical changes are introduced, the net result will not be the total destruction of the relevant resources, just their slow demise to a level at which it will not be viable to catch what remains.

“Talk of extinction is unlikely. It would probably take a violent change in the resource habitat and environment for all of a species to die out. The sea looks after its own, but recovery could take decades.”

An example is the KwaZulu Natal Seventy-four resource which six decades ago collapsed, losing its status as the most important target species for the commercial fishing Industry. This finally resulted in the fish been placed on the no-catch list. Three decades on, recovery has only possibly reached a level justifying their capture again but it also appears that certain behavioural changes might have occurred, resulting in its migration to a somewhat deeper environment.