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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
In February 2020, Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson published a commentary in the journal PNAS (see reference below), which sheds some “light of hope” for the Nassau Grouper, Epinephelus striatus (Bloch, 1792) stemming from successful work in the Cayman Islands and recently published by Waterhouse et al. (2020) .
In her commentary, Yvonne briefly describes how, once abundant and healthy populations of this grouper in the 1970’s and 1980’s in The Bahamas, were subsequently overfished for decades by artisanal and traditional fisheries. Such heavy exploitation occurred as a result of fisheries adopting better technology, growing commercialization and an increase in the grouper’s market value alongside weak management and lack of adequate monitoring of the fishery to understand trends in catches. This fishery situation led to the loss of an estimated 30 to 50 known spawning aggregation sites in the Bahamas, including some that were once famous at the time (Erisman et al., 2013). Without aggregation for spawning, the species does not reproduce and so the fish numbers declined leading to smaller and smaller catches.
Description
Keywords
Grouper
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Barreiros, J.P. (2023). Is there Hope for Nassau grouper? "Newsletter of the Groupers & Wrasses Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature" nº15. March 2023.