Preliminary model of the impact of pelagic fishing on the South African west coast in the vicinity of seal and penguin colonies

• Main Author: Plagányi, Éva E
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2005
• Subjects: pelagic fishing; South African west coast; Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18549; https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/11427/18549/1/Plaganyi_Preliminary_model_2005.pdf

Preliminary work is summarised here concerning the development of a model of the impact of pelagic fishing on the South African west coast in the vicinity of seal and penguin colonies, for report to the CCAMLR Scientific Committee to parallel and inform their similar initiative concerning krill fishing in the vicinity of krill-dependent predator colonies in the Antarctic Peninsula region through which there is a flux of krill. The decision to model the impact of the South African fishery on penguin and fur seal breeding colonies is because it is a topic of local interest and because of the readier availability of data from both predator studies and pelagic fish surveys, which can be used to provide flux estimates. A spatial modelling framework is used to assess what level and localisation of the fishing effort might negatively impact the predators. The models developed build to some extent on an earlier approach (Plagányi et al. 2000) to explore the effect of different geometric distributions and degrees of synchrony in the abundance of anchovy and its zooplankton prey off the South African west coast.