Gillnetting

Press, 27 June 1989, Page 20

Gillnetting

Sir, —Your editorial of June 15 correctly points out that drift gillnetting is unselective, wasteful and kills large numbers of non-target animals such as seabirds and marine mammals. Lost nets, known as “ghost nets,” continue to entangle fish and other animals. These problems are well publicised and, justifiably, have caused a great deal of public concern. It is seldom appreciated that these are problems of any form of gillnetting. It. should be pointed out that gillnets are also used by commercial and amateur fishers in New Zealand coastal waters, and are made of the same material as the driftnets used by Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Our fishers’ nets differ mostly in their size (length and height) and are usually set on the bottom, not at the surface. With very few exceptions, these nets, like their driftnet cousins, are unselective in what they catch, wasteful (as much of the catch may be damaged by sealice), and in Canterbury waters

they entangle significant numbers of our local Hector’s dolphins. Perhaps we should encourage our resource managers to address the general problems of gillnetting rather than concentrating on one form of it. — Yours, etc., BRIAN and JULIE FITNESS. June 15, 1989.