Peasant whitebait fishery season opens
It’s the closest thing New Zealand has to a ‘‘peasant’’ fishery.
With the season now open until the end of November in the north, whitebaiters are once again trying their luck along streams and rivers.
Whitebait are the only fish species in New Zealand allowed to be sold by recreational fishers. They don’t need a registered risk management programme certificate or meet standard food safety requirements.
Calls are growing to end commercial sales. While numbers of the five freshwater fish that make up ‘‘whitebait’’ are well down on last century, no one knows by how much.
Wild caught whitebait are available on the Trade Me site for around $80 a kilogramme.
Maori introduced European settlers to the tasty little wrigglers, and it’s been a free-forall ever since.
Fishers were told to record catches in the early 1960’s. Chaos ensued and it was dropped two years later.
‘‘Managers of the fishery have never had much idea how much fish was caught,’’ Freshwater scientist and whitebait expert the late Robert McDowall lamented in a report after the Department of Conservation took over management in 1990.
With no way to relate catches to populations, or gauge fishing impacts on stocks the fishery can’t be managed on ‘‘sound, biologically based principles’’ McDowall said.
DOC has been managing the complex fishery for 26 years regulating fishing methods, location, legal fishing times and net size.
Though much more is now known about the fish species, there is still little information about the fishery even now, DOC freshwater scientist Jane Goodman admits, with no recent research on fisheries management. Involved with successfully developing a breeding programme for one of the whitebait species, giant kokopu, Paul Decker with the Mahurangi Technical Institute at Warkworth is scathing of the department.
‘‘Encouraging fishers to only take what they need and to think about the sustainability of the fishery for future generations while continuing to allow the sale of wild stock is irresponsible,’’ he says.
‘‘The fishery can handle recreational catches but not the continued commercial harvest.’’