Butterflyfishes and fishing

[kochzius at uni-bremen.de]

Hi coral listers!

Here is a interesting reply from Andy.
I would be interested if other people made a similar experience and if 
there is any study about fishing pressure on butterfly fishes. Beside small 
scale fishery in developing countries I also would expect that collecting 
for aquarium fishes will have a negative impact on the population of 
butterflyfishes in certain areas.

Best fishes

Marc


>Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 07:23:26 -0700 (PDT)
>From: andy cornish <andy_cornish at yahoo.com>
>Subject: RE: Butterflyfishes as Indicators of change
>To: kochzius at uni-bremen.de
>
>Dear Marc and Victor,
>
>I was interested to see that Marc had mentioned the
>fishing as a potential problem with using
>butterflyfishes as indicators of coral health.
>Regardless of the other problems with this approach,
>the impact of fishing would certainly prevent these
>fishes being used here in Hong Kong, for example. We
>have small coral communities (up to 70% cover) that
>are legally fished with chicken-wire cage traps and
>gill/trammel nets. The cage traps occasionally catch
>butterflyfishes while the nets (down to just 2 cm
>square mesh size) are particularly effective at
>catching butterflyfishes, I even used them myself to
>obtain specimens. In localities where similar gears
>are used in coral environments, I doubt very much
>whether you could separate the effects of fishing from
>those related to coral health.
>
>Regards,
>
>Andy Cornish Ph.D
>University of Hong Kong
>
>
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