Fishermen have agreed to limit the amount of fishing from permitted gear in a key UK marine reserve as part of efforts to manage the area for nature and local communities.
A partnership between fishermen, scientists and conservationists in Lyme Bay, the UK’s largest inshore marine protected area, aims to conserve seafood stocks and make the local fishing industry sustainable.
Organisers hope the alliance will be a blueprint for managing areas of the sea for the benefit of communities and for nature, ahead of the setting up of a network of marine protected areas around UK waters. The partnership will also fund a scientific study by the University of Plymouth to see how much fishing the bay’s reefs can sustain.
In 2008 the Government closed off 60 square nautical miles of Lyme Bay to scallop dredging and bottom-trawling – fishing methods that were damaging the reefs – which conservationists say has allowed a partial recovery of fragile habitat.
But it drove a doubling of fishing pressure from other techniques which are still permitted, with more use of static pots and nets causing overfishing and declines of up to 50% in some species, marine charity the Blue Marine Foundation said.
Under the new partnership, which is part-funded by Marks & Spencer, a voluntary code signed by fishermen from four ports in the bay comes into force on Monday restricting the amount of gear used by any one fisherman to 250 crab and lobster pots, 500 whelk pots and individual nets of a maximum 600 metres.
At the moment up to 1,000 pots are being used by a few larger fishing vessels.
The voluntary restrictions, which come as regulators look at measures to limit the amount of fishing with static gear in the area, are the first example of self-regulation by UK fishermen, the Blue Marine Foundation said.
If it secures funding, the scheme could also boost tourism and the local economy through the establishment of a lobster fishery. The partnership also plans to fund environmental assessments to show that low-impact fishing of shellfish and fish species through static gear can be sustainable.
Fishermen taking part in the scheme said it made sense to find ways that would conserve both fish and fishermen, or they ran the risk of losing the industry altogether. They urged fishermen who had not signed up to the memorandum of understanding to do so.
2012 The Press Association