Features

Goukamma: A success story

Marine Protected Areas

Interview with Sven Kerwath

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Goukamma Nature Reserve and Marine Protected Area, situated on the Garden Route, near Knysna in South Africa, has shown that carefully managed marine protected areas can become a 'savings bank' for fisheries resources.
Photo by Peter Chadwick

By comparing how things were before the creation of the protected area and how they are afterwards, Sven Kerwath, a specialist scientist at the South African Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and his colleagues have been able to show the effects of the Goukamma marine protected area on both fish and fishers.

Your study looked at the effects of the Goukamma marine protected area on a specific fish species – red roman – and the local fishermen. Can you paint a picture of what it’s like to be there and stick your head under water?

Goukamma is on the Garden Route along South Africa’s south coast. It’s a medium-sized marine reserve, about 40 square kilometres (15.5 square miles) in extent. The first thing you notice when you dive in an area like Goukamma is that there are many more reef fishes than in fished areas. You have bigger fish, in general; you have a higher diversity as well. You also have more predators. You have a fair number of shark species there.
But you are allowed to fish from the shore of the Goukamma marine protected area and the offshore boundaries are not clear to the fishermen. So there is a lot of fishing along the demarcation line and even slightly inside the protected area.

Who are the fishers around Goukamma, specifically the ones who fish for red roman, the seabream your research concentrated on?

It’s a small-scale, essentially artisanal fishery, so from a livelihood point of view most of those people are on the verge of being at subsistence level. The fishing is low impact and small-scale, but high diversity. These are people who depend on the sea for their livelihoods, but over the years their boats have got bigger and slightly more industrialised. Some of the vessels have freezer capacity so they can go out overnight and they have started targeting reef fish species, including red roman. And many of these species have since almost disappeared.

What makes the study that you led exceptional?

When I started working for the South African government, I was tasked with overseeing the assessment of the line-fishery. I found this awesome database there: basically the National Marine Line-Fish System, which has all the commercial line-fish records since 1985 from all the fishers. It’s actually amazing. The proclamation of Goukamma [in 1990] is somewhere in the middle of the data series, so you have a before–after control impact study design. And that is something that doesn’t exist very often around the world apparently – well, otherwise someone else would have done a similar study! And because the red roman seabream is endemic to South Africa, we can assess the entire population.

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Photo by Peter Chadwick

What did the creation of the Goukamma marine protected area do to catches in the area?

Firstly, the red roman population in general was in decline for many years across the species’ entire range before the Goukamma marine protected area was created. That had been shown before. But the interesting thing was that after the marine reserve was established, virtually from the following year, the catches of the fishers around it started to increase, at first very slowly and then, after about five or six years, much more steeply. In all the other areas where the species lives, it either continued to decline or there was no clear trend up or down.

Red roman grow slowly and live a long time, but you still saw their catches increase just one year after Goukamma was created. How is that possible?

Inside the marine reserve, the bigger fish are not fished out, whereas outside they are fished continuously. Inside they can grow, so a difference is established quite quickly. And although fish cross the boundary, more of the smaller fish go into the marine reserve and more of the larger fish come out of it, so there is a net export of biomass.

But after five or six years – the time it takes for the fish to grow to a size that can be harvested – then you see the real effect; to my mind, the important effect. And that’s the export of larvae and eggs out of the marine reserve. It was quite amazing that we could actually detect this effect in the fishers’ catches.

How did the marine protected area affect the fishermen in the area?

When the marine protected area was established the fishers lost some of their fishing grounds, but because of how their access points are distributed around the reserve, the travel distance from the access points to their fishing sites didn’t really change. Because they normally target a number of different reefs, there was actually little change in fishing patterns. So although it’s always claimed that fishers are disadvantaged when a marine protected area is designated right on top of their fishing grounds, here it wasn’t the case. In our data, we couldn’t find any evidence for that.

Did these findings surprise you?

I was very surprised, firstly that what we found sort of matches what is predicted in terms of reserve effects and secondly that there was little evidence of the negative effects that people associate with marine protected areas. It’s clear that this marine protected area functions like a bank. Fishers put some of their stock aside and now they reap the benefits. It takes a number of years, but not really a long time.

This well-thought-out study has shown that for small stretches of coast and for this kind of fishery, which exists all over the world, marine protected areas can be the way forward.

Photo by Peter Chadwick

There are scientists and fishermen who think that marine protected areas aren’t useful for managing fisheries. What do you think?

We’ve got about five or six different tools that we can use to manage fisheries. And marine protected areas, to my mind, are certainly one of them.

Most of our conventional fisheries regulations, like size limits or bag limits, don’t really help some of the reef fish species because they are prone to barotrauma. In other words, if you pull them up from the deep their swim bladders inflate and eventually burst. They are either going to be eaten by seagulls or they are just too damaged to survive, so you can’t really release any of those species. So although most of South Africa’s marine reserves were not put in place exclusively for the benefit of line-caught fish, they help the stocks tremendously because they represent refuges.

I believe that it’s difficult – especially politically – to establish new marine protected areas because people feel they will be at a disadvantage. To my mind, though, it’s like saying, ‘OK, if I put some of my money into the bank, I will be at a disadvantage because I don’t have money in my pocket.’ That may be true, but you have it in the bank and there it will grow and you will reap the interest, instead of incurring more debt.

Given that the South African government has proposed opening the Tsitsikamma marine protected area to recreational fishing, what do you think is in store for Goukamma?

I think there will be a realignment in policy and there will be changes. There will be, for lack of a better word, a transformation in South African fisheries. I feel it’s also needed.

But as a scientist, I think the way to go about these things is to assess the situation based on data, empirical data, and to take it from there. Opening marine protected areas without a proper plan will never be a good idea. Doing away with size limits or bag limits without a proper plan, without data, won’t be a good idea either. On the other hand, putting big marine protected areas into places where they don’t do anything is also not a good idea. It doesn’t help anybody.

In terms of Tsitsikamma, my personal opinion is that it’s not a good idea to open it without considering all of the information available. I think any decision needs to be substantiated with data – that’s the bottom line. That’s our business as scientists. I will give advice based on empirical data, not on my perceptions. That is how I conduct my work and what makes me objective.

As a government scientist, I’m employed because of the fishers. Everything that I do is to help them and to contribute to the optimal exploitation of marine resources – for as many people as possible, for as long as possible. That’s it.

Photo by Peter Chadwick

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