MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands, “knowledge gap” with the Loligo fishery, environmentally sensitive

The second Loligo squid season in the Falkland Islands fishery has been brought to an early close, finishing around a week sooner than expected. The daily monitoring of the catch showed the biomass had reached the minimum threshold required to safeguard the long-term sustainability of the stock.

Spanish sources mention than the vessels on the Loligo squid season managed some 18,000 tons, and accepted the fact that conservation and sustainability of the fisheries must be paramount. Anyhow, a few of the vessels remained in the South Atlantic to take advantage of other pending fishing licenses.

Mathew Jenkins, Director of Natural Resources from the Falklands Government said that much more scientific research is needed since to understand what is going on with the biomass, and the fact that Loligo is seemingly highly sensitive to environmental factors.

Interviewed by the Falklands TV, Jenkins said Loligo has a twelve month life cycle and there is natural variation among the years, “they are highly sensitive to environmental factors but exactly what those parameters are, we don’t know at the moment”.

“There are knowledge gaps around the Loligo fishery, and we have already started conversations with SAERI (scientific research center in the Islands) and other stakeholders to understand what those knowledge gaps are whether there are short, medium or long term”.

Jenkins added that he expects that work can be done between all of the stakeholders to try and address some of those knowledge gaps.

“I am hoping we are able to start some of the research next year. Some of them will be midterm and long term projects, and since they are projects they will take a number of years to establish some reliable baseline data”
Finally, “this should help us extrapolate the data to understand what is going on, but it will take considerably longer”.