- VOL. 6.7
Just a FAD. Restoring Local Fish Populations
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Just a FAD. Restoring Local Fish Populations
By Bill O’Leary
The inshore waters of the Andaman Sea - extending along Thailand’s west coast from the Malaysian island of Tarutao in the south to Burma’s Mergui Archipelago in the north - is set to become Asia’s most popular aquatic playground, attracting tourists from all over the world. And one of the fastest growing and most popular sports in this area is big gamefishing.
The relatively shallow warm waters around Phuket are home to a wide range of pelagic fish species. “Pelagic” means open-ocean, and generally pertains to species traveling together in schools close to the surface following baitfish on their migratory routes. These types of fish have no home. They maybe here today and gone tomorrow, a constant source of frustration for big-game fishermen.
The game fishing industry in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was the first to realize that the constant commercial trawling and gamefishing of their inshore waters had seriously depleted local stocks of pelagic species. The only answer to the problem was to find a way to bring these fish back to their area. They joined forces with the local government to set up the world’s first FAD programme in 1970. FADs, or fish-attracting devices, are designed to encourage fish populations to inhabit a certain area.
The first step was to create large artificial reefs using old cars, trucks, concrete blocks, derelict ships, industrial machinery, old tires and other non-toxic materials to build environments on the ocean floor. These underwater structures were soon supporting algae, barnacles, soft and hard corals and sea grasses. This growth attracted all sorts of baitfish, which fed off the algae and used the many available hiding places to shelter from their predators. These schools of baitfish attracted an assortment of larger sedentary predators as well as schools of pelagic species.
In short, the scheme worked; and Fort Lauderdale’s gamefishing industry was saved. The artificial reefs attracted more sedentary bottom-dwelling predators like grouper, snapper, coral trout, moray eels and sharks. Free-roaming tuna, barracuda, trivally, dolphin, rainbow runner, long toms, sailfish and marlin were attracted by all the other fish life in the area.
Local dive operators made use of these artificial reefs as new dive sites and, after a few years of fast coral growth, some of the sites even looked like natural reef habitats. The local gamefishing fraternity started fishing tournaments on the new reefs and, because they were sometimes difficult for vessels to locate without GPS, the promoters and some dive companies marked the areas with large mooring buoys. The surface bait activity around these mooring buoys provided more gamefishing strikes than trolling across the reefs. It wasn’t long before competitors started taking turns trolling around the marker buoys rather than across the new artificial reefs.
It seemed that even a simple rope and a float was enough to create a FAD, if it were left for a month or two. In fact, it was starting to look like almost any foreign object on the ocean floor at any depth could work as a fish magnet, creating habitats for all sorts of marine creatures. Good news travels fast, and soon more artificial-reef programme were sponsored in other seaside locations where fish populations were becoming depleted. Ships’ chandlery stores and fishing tackle shops started stocking all sorts of ground tackle and underwater structures that could be laid in secret positions to attract fish for upcoming tournaments. The most popular of these devices was the “Sea Kite”, a huge neutrally buoyant kite that could be deployed at any depth and always attracted plenty of gamefishing.
Game fishermen and local dive shop operators in the Fort Lauderdale area actively made an effort to save their fish populations and in so doing also protected their own livelihoods.
One can only imagine the amount of fish that must have been in the Andaman Sea 50 years ago. It must have been quite incredible, considering the amount of nutrients in coastal waters fed by the hundreds of creeks and rivers running off the thousands of miles of coastline on the Malay peninsula, the east coast of Sumatra and Thailand’s west coast. But constant drift netting, trawling and long-lining by Indonesian, Malaysian, Burmese and Thai fishing fleets has devastated local fish populations. Each year more vessels are built with the latest technology and are sent ever farther airfield for longer catches for their Asian markets. At the same time, the mangrove habitats so crucial to marine life are fast disappearing to make way for development and, ironically, much of this tidal land is being turned to prawn farming.
A few artificial reefs and fish-attracting devices deployed around Phuket in strategic positions would benefit both gamefishing enthusiasts and local dive operators. This would provide the area with little fish havens for all to enjoy as well as help, in however small a way, the local commercial fishing industry. It worked in Fort Lauderdale.
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