N.Z. FISHERIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 100, 29 April 1937, Page 10

N.Z. FISHERIES

NOT INEXHAUSTIBLE

SOME FACTS AND FANCIES

NEED FOR RESEARCH

In his presidential address to the Wellington Philosophical Society last night, Mr. A. E. Hefford, Chief Inspector of Fisheries, who took as his subject, "Fish: Facts and Fancies," spoke of the importance of the economic and biological aspects of fishing in New Zealand waters. Lantern slides were used to illustrate his lecture, which was held in the Dominion Museum lecture hall.

[1 One popular fancy which Mr. Hefif ford exploded is that the New Zeais land waters contain an inexhaustible ?- supply of fish. One authority, ber tween sixty and seventy years ago, n stated, "I do not only believe, but t- I know, that there is an inexhaustible source of natural wealth swarming uni- molested round these islands, that will i- yet be a profitable resource to the c laborious fishermen, and contribute p largely to the aggregate prosperity it of the country. In my own humble r view, our present mineral wealth is ■- nothing now to what it will become in c the time to come, yet I believe that U the fisheries of this country will 5 surpass it in wealth, permanence, and c stability." Other optimistic appraise- =• ments of New Zealand's fishery wealth s had been made in more recent years, d and a general idea had prevailed that d there was an enormous wealth of fish !t life in the waters round New Zealand. c Legislation, however, had been framed at intervals for the purpose of the d conservation of the fisheries, which showed that some people, at any rate, ! f were alive to the facts and did not '" indulge altogether in fancies. ; ~ "Experience up to the present day," said Mr. Hefford, "has shown us that c the bountiful supplies of fish off our New Zealand coasts which were presumed to be available by earlier observers—who did not and could not observe very extensively—are not so bountiful and inexhaustible as they had fancied them to be." Forty years ago. he added, all practical men scoffed at the idea of worrying about the con- - servation of the North Sea fisheries. - All they had to do when the' fish - on one area became scarce was to go - further afield where they were plen--7 tiful. [ LIMITED RESOURCES.This, however, had proved to be a mistake, and it was a mistake which New Zealand was inclined to copy. "The sea fishing resources of New Zealand, far from being of vast extent and up to the present hardly touched, are actually of relatively small extent, and such exploitation as has taken place up to the present time—though this exploitation has been feeble compared with the much more intensive and extensive fishery operations of the northern seas—has had a manifestly depleting effect on our most valuable stocks." said Mr. Hefford. "The possibility of the existence of untapped resources is limited by the fact that New Zealand is a group of oceanic islands situated in the centre of the water hemisphere which, anomalous as it may appear, is not the region of prolific fisheries and superabundant marine life. Such life is dependent for its basic source ''of nourishment upon the mineral matter that is brought by river effluents from the land, and is therefore most concentrated round the margin of these islands. Experience everywhere has shown that the intensive exploitation that modern invention and engineering have made possible has depleted much vaster fishing resources than New Zealand possesses. Exploitation has forged ahead with all the momentum that could be given to it by the inventions of physical science. Conservation, dependent for guidance on biological science, has definitely been helped when it has called for biological advice, listened to it, and acted upon it. "The lesson to us is clear. It will pay us belter as a nation to investigate our fishery resources scientifically so that the requirements of conservation may be definitely understood and exploitation rationally controlled rather than wait in a state of inertia till manifest depletion of the fishing grounds stirs us into activity when it is too late—when the battle will have been lost and the measures requisite for recuperation and recruitment too expensive. For the last sixty years Governments have been ready enough to legislate, but, not even in the most recent times, to investigate so as to be able to legislate intelligently." DEPLETION BY TRAWLERS. All trawling grounds around New Zealand were quite close to land, Mr. HefJord pointed out. "At a short distance from the land the sea is so deep that it is not much good trawling," he said. "I would not go so far as to say that there is an absence of fish, but such fish as could be caught would not have the same abundance, nor would they be of the same commercial value as those caught in relatively shallow water, and would require more powerful gear, which would involve higher working expenses. There may ■ be banks away out to sea—l definitely • know of one such area—that have I never yet been fished over, but they < cannot be considerable. I can see no • such enormous potentialities as have < been adumbrated by people in. the 1 seventies and eighties and by official and unofficial optimists in the first two decades of this century. The very obvious depletion of such of our old inshore trawling grounds that have been continuously worked and which would certainly have been recruited from outside stocks if outside stocks had existed to any appreciable extent, is itself a convincing reminder that our fish populations are not considerable." Some of the schemes for the development of New Zealand's fisheries had failed, added Mr. Hefford, because they had tried to reproduce the methods of old countries of the Northern Hemi- r sphere which were not suitable for New Zeaalnd conditions. "Not for . that matter," said Mr. Hefford, "was l: our legislation for conservation: it was *■ made—and mostly copied—in ignorance h of the objective material concerned, an ignorance that, I fear, has persisted, very largely, to this day." °