What are Marlin Worth?

The NZ Marine Research Foundation has just released an $85,000 contract to establish an answer to this question. The Foundation, a Trust set up by our Council determined that this information was essential to support the justification and present law that marlin are a recreational only fish. There have been other species of fish studied, funded by Government, on recreational value to the country, but marlin were excluded from the studies. It was assessed unlikely that the Crown would fund the project so the Trustees gave it a high priority, which resulted in the project being tendered and accepted.

The very valuable contribution to the NZ economy directly attributable to Marlin is assessed from international and domestic tourism, accommodation, charters, restaurants, tackle, club membership and many other business associated indirectly to assisting anglers peruse their catch. While often guesstimated as a very considerable sum, it has never been scientifically established. Armed with this information we can resist anticipated challenges from commercial fishers and fuel our main argument that recreational use of the resource brings the highest returns in value to the country. This being coupled with the growing acceptance of tagging and releasing which is presently 60% and increasing, shows responsible use of the resource for now and the future. It’s expected that the study will be available for the Council’s AGM in September 2001.

Tuna Tagging

NZ is about to join NSW in establishing a tagging program for Tuna. Following requests from clubs in areas like the Bay of Plenty who specifically target and catch predominately the tuna species, we now have a trial program for tuna tagging. Tagging programs have long been established for Marlin, Sharks and Kingfish but tuna had been overlooked even though our knowledge of the species still is severely lacking. The lack of a tag program has created the impression by recreational anglers that tuna did not recover well from being caught and had little chance of survival and therefore tagging or releasing appeared a wasted effort. Where in fact a tagging study of 40,000 tuna by the South Pacific Commission (outside of NZ) in the 1990’s had a 12% recapture rate which is considerably greater than any fish species in the program.

The Council was reluctant to undertake the program without support from the Ministry and their scientific resources to collate and interpret the data. This has now been approved and fishers can commence tagging immediately. The most frequent caught tuna are Yellowfin and it is expected that many average size fish will now be released instead of being weighed to feature in club’s tally books. It is also expected clubs will modify their tournaments to encourage tagging as an option as they have done for Marlin, Sharks and Kingfish. The trial program will be initially for one year to establish angler acceptance of tagging. If successful the program will introduce special tags for smaller fish (less than 10kgs) for which the present tags used are deemed not suitable.

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