Science Centres: Fisheries

NIWA has completed the third photographic survey of scampi off the east coast of the North Island. The work has been done for the Ministry of Fisheries, and is intended to produce a time series of relative abundance indices for use in stock assessment modelling.

We use equipment and survey techniques developed progressively by NIWA since 1998. During these surveys, using our coastal research vessel Kaharoa, we typically take 600 to 1000 high-resolution digital photographs of the seabed at scampi depths (200–600 m). Each photograph is then examined independently by three experienced readers who count and measure the scampi and their characteristic burrows.

Scampi have been fished commercially since 1988, but no reliable estimates of their numbers were available until NIWA started conducting photographic surveys a decade later. Standard techniques such as trawl surveys, catch-per-unit-effort analysis, and acoustic surveying have been found to be unreliable because of the cryptic, burrowing behaviour of this species. Photography could potentially be applied to other deepwater invertebrates.