Examination of Witness (Questions 40-59)
3 NOVEMBER 2003
MR NICHOLAS
TREGENZA
Q40 Mr Mitchell: Pingers should be
universally required, this is what you are saying?
Mr Tregenza: Yes.
Q41 Mr Wiggin: Is not there a problem?
If you have got an eight-mile net, pinging all the way along,
you are going to interfere seriously with the habits of the porpoises.
That is a long way to drive an animal away from its food?
Mr Tregenza: It is, but they never
set at eight miles, they would set eight nets of one mile. It
is true, you are excluding the porpoise from an area that is a
kilometre wide with a net down the centre of it, but that is not
the only fish and chip shop in town, as it were, the porpoise
can go somewhere else. You are displacing them. They seem to come
back fairly quickly, within about three hours. People have tried
to assess the extent of this habitat exclusion, and it comes out
at a few per cent. I estimate, in the Celtic Sea, it is under
1%. Where it is worrying is if you started having pingers in estuaries
or fjords or places like that, because then you would trap any
animals that were in there, or block any that wanted to come in,
and really you would disturb their ability to move round their
habitat.
Q42 Mr Wiggin: Then you have got
the problem with bottlenose dolphins which can be inshore or offshore,
have you not?
Mr Tregenza: Yes. We think there
are two kinds of bottlenose dolphins. One live mainly offshore,
and we are not quite so worried about them as the ones that live
inshore, which you saw in the video, and they live very close
to the coast.
Q43 Diana Organ: Following on from
what Mr Wiggin has been asking, it is all a matter of balance,
and whatever. How much are fishermen tending to set gill nets
near the coastal inlets, so that it is trapping porpoises into
those estuaries? Is there a real problem with that, or is it something
that might happen?
Mr Tregenza: It is not as bad
as it might be because in a lot of those estuaries they are not
allowed to set gill nets anyway, because of regulations under
the Bass Act. Mr Muirhead would know more about that than I do,
but most of those estuaries already are net-free.
Q44 Diana Organ: Given that, the
question about the balance between what might be causing a displacement
of porpoises, that they are not setting their nets in those inlets
so we do not have to worry too much about that, and actually being
able to do it, therefore should we not make pingers compulsory
possibly in some inshore fisheries, and we pick and choose where
they are, depending on the distribution of, say, bottlenose dolphins?
Mr Tregenza: The bottlenose dolphins
constantly motor around the coast of Cornwall and Devon and up
into Dorset. There is no clear pattern.
Q45 Diana Organ: You are saying that
there is an obvious thing, that the pingers cause porpoises to
displace, and we would be worried about it if they got trapped
in inlets, and then we said that fishermen are not allowed to
set their gill nets near coastal inlets. Given that is the case,
cannot we say then it is compulsory in certain areas where we
are worried about the bottlenose dolphin population?
Mr Tregenza: I am not worried
about the displacement issue.
Q46 Diana Organ: Are you not?
Mr Tregenza: Not really, no, because
I think it is much less serious than the by-catch issue, and it
does not cover a very large percentage of the seabed, and the
inlets are being dealt with already mostly by the Bass Act.
Q47 Diana Organ: You are looking
to see that they are compulsory on all inshore UK fisheries?
Mr Tregenza: Yes.
Q48 Mr Drew: Just to pursue Diana's
line of inquiry, do you not think your approach is a bit blunt,
to put it mildly, in the sense that we have a specific problem
with a relatively small number of the cetacean species? If I were
a fisherman, could this not be seen, in a sense, as a sort of
slippery slope, that you start with a six-mile limit and you walk
it onwards from that? Clearly, this is the EU intending to impose
their will. Is there any compromise here, or is there going to
be a major falling-out?
Mr Tregenza: Overall, I do not
think this is a slippery slope, I think it is a serious issue.
The porpoise by-catch in the Celtic Sea, for instance, when we
measured it, was 6% per annum. That is more than the population
is likely to be able to sustain. Common dolphins, the ones that
get caught in the mid-water trawls, we cannot really assess the
total take because they get caught in a lot of different fisheries,
the same population of common dolphins. For bottlenose dolphins,
again, we cannot really assess the level of take. For all these,
we do have good evidence of really serious declines. Porpoises
used to be in our harbours. Virginia Woolf used to see porpoises
up the Ouse, in Sussex, four miles from the coast, they are never
seen there now. They used to be fished in the Fal, they are never
seen there now. People were employed to shoot them in Cornwall's
estuaries in the 1930s, they have disappeared, so they are in
trouble. Bottlenose dolphins disappeared from Cornwall for 20
years, or so. Common dolphins, we really could not say what has
happened to the numbers there, but in the Mediterranean they have
absolutely crashed. These animals are in trouble, and we do have
to take a precautionary view.
Q49 Diana Organ: Their numbers have
crashed not because of fishing, have not they crashed because
of the pollution?
Mr Tregenza: Yes, I think you
are right. We interviewed 1,000 people in Cornwall for their memories
of these animals and it was clear the decline preceded gill nets,
and really it seemed best to fit organochlorine pollution, which
was what decimated otters, peregrine falcons, sparrow-hawks, and
so on. Otters are coming back magnificently now that has been
controlled. Everything that is known about the chemistry and the
biology fits with it hitting these animals hard, so they are out
of the frying-pan into the fire. The pollution issue is improving,
but in the meantime the gill net issue has come along.
Q50 Diana Organ: If we could get,
say, the water and sewage companies to clean up their act, so
that the inshore and coastal inlets waters were cleaner than they
are now, the numbers of all of these animals, which we would wish
to see swimming around in our waters, would rise, and there would
not be the problem that we are faced with. It is not a fishery
effort that is causing their numbers to deplete?
Mr Tregenza: It is not what caused
it to deplete initially, but it may be causing it to stay low,
continue to fall, or maybe it is creeping back up. We cannot really
tell you which of those three is happening at the moment.
Q51 Diana Organ: It just seems a
bit unfair to put all the cost on the fishermen when actually
there is a real responsibility from other organisations, notably
water companies, to do something about decreasing the pollution?
Mr Tregenza: Water companies were
never involved in controlling organochlorine pollution, that was
restriction of pesticides and PCB chemicals used in industry.
Mr Mitchell: One is the enemy of the
other. Here are two problems which are killing them.
Q52 Mr Breed: You will be aware that
in recent years we have put more and more regulation, more and
more cost, on our fishermen, and their ability to function as
a profitable business has been reduced considerably. If we were
to introduce compulsory pingers, and judging by the examples you
have shown us they do not exactly seem to have been subject to
nanotechnology, quite yet, what would be the impact of those additional
costs on fishermen generally, if we were to say they should be
used compulsorily?
Mr Tregenza: I know roughly what
the costs are, what the actual impact will be I am not so sure
about. For some small inshore fishermen, that would be the last
straw. In a way, another view is that this is an abundant natural
resource that is chronically overfished, so the fishing industry
staggers along as a kind of peasant economy, with everybody saying,
"We can only just make a living." If it were downsized
substantially, fish stocks would rise, individual fishermen would
be relatively wealthy, they would be able to afford these things,
and most of the negative impacts of fishing would be diminished,
enforcement costs would go down. There is always a confusion of
fisheries policy, as to whether it is a kind of job management
scheme or a fish production management scheme, and mostly the
science is always focused on the fish stock when maybe it should
have been focused on how do you get jobs by spending this amount
of money?
Q53 Mr Breed: You are heading into
interesting and deep waters, I think. Effectively, what you are
saying is it might be desirable to lay the whole load of cost
on the fishermen, reduce the number of fishing vessels, who would
then be profitable because they could afford all the measures
to do that. Then we would protect fish, and overall we would see
fish stocks rise again perhaps, and there would be new opportunities,
but getting from where we are to there might be a painful process?
Mr Tregenza: Yes, and I do not
think you can get there just by piling costs on them, I think
you have to decommission the industry and hold down its size,
so that then you have a small and very profitable, happy industry.
Q54 Mr Breed: Just supposing that
if pingers do not prove wholly effective, and perhaps some of
the other measures, and we still see continuing problems, what
action do you consider should be taken then to protect the cetacean
population?
Mr Tregenza: Pingers have worked
very well in porpoise populations, the porpoise by-catch in gill
nets, but if they did turn out not to be working so well, my next
best choice would be the breakable nets, as it were, that might
be a good one. After that, I do not know really, it would be a
difficult situation. The gill nets have a lot of good features
actually, they are very selective on fish size.
Q55 Mr Breed: There is not an exhaustible
number of options, if we are going to take this matter seriously?
Mr Tregenza: No. People talk about
alternative fishing techniques, but they are not easily come by.
Q56 Mr Mitchell: That brings us right
to the nub of the Common Fisheries Policy argument. If extra costs
are imposed on our industry it is usually asked to bear it, if
they are imposed on other industries it is usually subsidised
by the government, and from what we heard earlier the problem
is largely one of French vessels?
Mr Tregenza: That is the common
dolphin by-catch in mid-water trawls, yes. I agree, largely that
is French vessels.
Q57 Alan Simpson: You mentioned in
some of your earlier comments the difficulties of monitoring,
and I think you set out quite a clear picture of the complexities
of doing that, and, say, what are we going to do if there is one
in five of the pingers that are defective? Just trying to think
that through, it struck me that, in practice, we would have something
like the tolerances that the police use in terms of speeding,
so that if we were able to set up effective monitoring, if one
in five were defective you would be told to get it repaired or
replaced, if two in five you would be in breach. That would be
the rule of thumb. This depends upon there being a set of mechanisms
that work. You are doing some work on the effectiveness of pingers
as they stand. Just on your TAD pinger, how does that differ from
what we have currently?
Mr Tregenza: These pingers scare
the animals away, they are very loud in the water. The thing I
am working on is much quieter, actually it sounds like a porpoise
using its sonar, and porpoises respond by using their sonar back
to investigate what it is. We have some evidence, from the work
I have done with the Newlyn fishermen, that the animals get entangled
when they are going round not using their sonar. All these cetaceans
have sonar, like bats, they send out pulses and listen for the
echoes, and it may be the silent porpoise that is the problem,
and this little device might make the silent porpoise switch on
its sonar, spot the net and behave accordingly. We have established
with the Newlyn fishermen that porpoises are frequently around
their nets without getting caught. Fifteen years ago, or 10 years
ago, we thought they just could not see the nets, blundered into
them and got caught. Now we know that mostly they manage to avoid
them, but just occasionally they do not. This device would make
them turn on their sonar and spot the net, and its batteries will
run for so long you could build them, date-stamp them and then
just look at the pinger on the net and say it is out of date,
no argument, you knew, everybody knew, it would be much easier
as an enforcement thing. I do not want to say anybody should start
waiting for this, because it is a long process, it may not work
at all, it may not be the correct diagnosis of the problem.
Q58 Alan Simpson: Are you the only
ones looking at new types of pingers?
Mr Tregenza: Other people are
looking at more complicated pingers that save batteries by pinging
only if there is a porpoise around, but, basically, there is only
me and somebody in Denmark, yes.
Q59 Alan Simpson: At some point,
questions will be thrown up about the economics of this, what
you describe as the peasant industry, whether the economics of
this sort of approach are sustainable for the industry at all,
and we would need to understand where the costs are coming, as
well as who is going to be picking up the bill for them. Have
you got very far with this, given it is just you and this other
person in Denmark?
Mr Tregenza: I do not think you
should even think about these things in the future as something.
. . They are very speculative. We know that these pingers cost
about £60 each, you have one every 100 metres on your net.
If you are a boat like the one you saw in the BBC footage, that
is £9,600 to pinger-up his nets and it is about £500
for batteries every year, and it is the time to do the battery
change every two years, which is probably about four man days
of work.
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