Orange roughy: campaigners call for limit to trawling of species after breeding age of 73 revealed

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) manages orange roughy stock as though the fish reaches maturity and breeds at 27 to 32 years of age.

But campaigners say a new assessment of orange roughy in New Zealand suggests that age could be much higher which could have implications for the ability for populations to recover after fishing.

The age at which 95% of stocks were breeding was 73.3 years.

The concerns have been raised as the new environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, travelled to Lisbon for the UN oceans conference. Plibersek has said she wants Australia to take a global leadership role in ocean protection.

New Zealand vessels have begun arriving in Tasmania and the AFMA said it had granted one boat approval to trawl for the species this year.

Meder said sustainable fisheries practices typically tried to ensure that fish populations had a chance to start replacing themselves before they were caught.

Karli Thomas, a New Zealand-based ocean advocate with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said deep-sea trawling put fish and other species, including deep-sea corals, at risk.

She said orange roughy was already a species that was known to be vulnerable and easily overfished.

A spokesperson for the AFMA cautioned that the data was specific to one orange roughy stock on the east coast of New Zealand.

They said there had been comprehensive data collection for orange roughy stocks in Australian since the 1990s and over many years it had shown that most of the fish that were gathering to breed were between 20 and 40 years old.

Orange roughy in Australia have been managed under a stock rebuilding strategy since 2006 to allow populations to recover from historical overfishing.

The populations are managed as six stocks. The two stocks that are considered sustainable have catch limits in place. Targeted fishing of the remaining four stocks is prohibited.