Received an email from John McVeigh yesterday in response to a submission I sent in April.

Mr McVeigh stated that "There needs to be a viable and sustainable commercial fishery if local seafood is to be available to the community."

Also stated - "Fisheries Qld have advised that tailor stocks have recently been assessed as sustainably fished. Long term monitoring of length and age composition indicates the stock is recovering from the mid 2000s when older classes of fish were missing from catches. These older classes of fish, up to six years old, are now present in the stock. Recent management changes introduced in 2010 to further enhance tailor stocks, include an increase in the minimum size limit from 30cm to 35cm."

Now, I could write a thesis based on the above statements alone, but just for starters:

Are mullet taken from the beach ending up at local seafood retailers and actually being consumed by humans? It would seem that if they are, it is only a small percentage and the rest is going to bait, pet food or fertiliser.

Tailor - "Recovering"???? That statement just has me completely gobsmacked. While the entire recreational fraternity along the entire east coast are reporting that tailor have all but disappeared and most notibly in the last 2 years, FQ state that there are actually more and bigger tailor out there than there was 8 years ago. Well, where are they? If they're offshore than we have a problem anyway.

I would suggest that just because researchers failed to find the older classes of fish in their mid 2000s research which reported a 'missing' population', doesn't mean that the location of some 'recently', indicates a recovery. Please prove me wrong FQ, but do you guys seriously have a handle on this? Are tailor still of a smaller size-at-age? If they are, then your own evidence indicates that tailor are still 'overfished' - not "sustainably" fished. As FQ should well know, these evolutionary changes do not reverse overnight and recovery of species that have suffered evolutionary change can take decades even after fishing pressure has been removed - as stated in Leigh and O'Neill's 2004 paper into the tailor fishery.

Not addressed in Mr Mcveigh's email, is the fact that commercial nets are spooking fish which radically reduces recreational prospects, can reduce fecundity of the stock, and has severe ramifications for seabirds - whose numbers have halved since 2004. FQ would seem to be doing their best to ignore this aspect of commercial netting, despite Tony Ham telling me that "We have noticed the same thing with Australian salmon." Well, if FQ do have an awareness that nets spook fish, then they had better start reading some recent research by the likes of Schmitz et al, Peckarsky et al, Sih et al, Jorgensen et al, Anderson et al, Ameer Abdullah, Walsh et al, Hsieh et al, Hutchings and baum, Sharpe and Hendry, Orrock et al, Hebshi et al, Heino and Godo, Vail and McCormick. All of these scientists are stating that overfishing of commercially targeted species alters the spatial dynamics of target and non-target species with ramifications to growth rates, size at maturity, fecundity, and non-consumptive effects that can contribute markedly to population collapses and trophic cascades.

Or, if you wait a few weeks, I'll explain in a great deal of depth, in a document that I'm mid way through, what all of these scientists and many others are stating is occurring in heavily harvested stocks - like tailor which have a harvest rate of over 80% of fish available to the fishery. I will also be producing separate documents into the tailor fishery and into the impact of beach seine netting on seabirds.

As I said to Tony Ham, "these issues are never going to go away and at some stage you are going to have to address them if you are to manage any of our fisheries effectively."

Lindsay Dines