I've spent the last couple of days with Phil Sawyer visiting Port Lincoln and other interesting places at the tip of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.
They have had a bit of rain.
We drove down to Sleaford Bay on Friday.
Its a rugged landscape.
Some of the first settlers were whalers.
Here's a 300 kg bubber pot once used by Sleaford Bay whalers to extract oil.
More recently Port Lincoln residents have got rich fatten tuna for Japanese markets.
These pilchard will be fed to tuna that are held in cages in the sea to the south of Port Lincoln.
Prawn trawlers, abalone and crayfish fishermen still operate out of Port Lincoln. I watched a procession of about 20 prawn trawlers leave the harbour Friday night. They will be out for 11 days.
This is a photograph of some of the rigging on the boats in the afternoon, before they departed.
The Mayor suggested to me yesterday that Port Lincoln would be a good place for a wind-powered desalination plant.
There are already wind turbines in the area. This picture was taken yesterday from Coffin Bay National Park looking south.
Why has some one not been sued and compensation given to W.A fishermen when the pilchard virus wiped out their industry causing major financial loss and hardship and in many cases caused health problems as a direct result of the stress indured by these fshermen?
For the people that haven't read this snippet from WWF
As reported by Ward et al. (2001), in 1995 and 1998-1999 the Australian population of pilchard, Sardinops sagax was affected by two mass mortalities that each killed more fish over a larger area than any other mono-specific fish-kill ever recorded. The responsible agent was found to be a previously unknown herpesvirus (pilchard herpesvirus PHV, Hyatt et al., 1997), thought to be exotic to Australian sardines (as suggested by the lack of previous similar events, the focal origin of epizootics and the dramatic spread through the entire species range; Gaughan, 2002). The first epidemic event spread at about 30 km/day from Anxious Bay, South Australia, and covered 5000 km of coastline from March to September 1995. In 1995 but not in 1998, mortalities also spread to New Zealand (Smith, 1995). As a result, spawning biomass of S. sagax in South Australian waters fell by 75%; spawning biomass reduction following the 1998 event is estimated at about 70% (Ward et al., 2001).
There is consensus among independent scientists to point to the introduction of thousands of tonnes of imported, untreated (frozen whole) pilchard S. sagax in the marine environment by the tuna farming industry as the most likely origin of PHV in Australian waters (Jones et al., 1997; Ward et al., 2001; Gaughan et al., 2000). The outbreaks began in two areas (Anxious Bay and Spencer Gulf) located less than 250 km from Port Lincoln, where large quantities of untreated imported frozen pilchard were fed to bluefin tuna held in sea cages. Ward et al. (2001) report that the location and timing of the 1995 and 1998-1999 mortality events was not random; according to Gaughan (2002) the probability of a second mass mortality starting randomly within the same 250 km stretch of coast in Australia is only 0.001.
Hi all,
I know that I am a bit out of date on this debate. But I just want to ask anyone of you who knows about Dolphins stranded in fishing nets (pilchard fisheries mostly) in Port Lincoln. Any hint on where to search for that?
I cant believe I didnt get a reaction from anybody after the last statement I made about the causes of the pilchard virus... Money has won out again , just ask the recreational horse owners of Australia . Stike 2 for AQIS.