Pacific Fisheries
Fisheries Education Program Targets US and Pacific Island Students
Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council
Did you know that the Pacific armorhead is the only fish stock in the entire federal waters of the US Pacific Islands to be classified as overfished by the federal government?
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Did you know that skipjack tuna is being harvested at only 20 percent of its potential?
A common misperception is that all fisheries are overfished or being overutilized. It is true that many inshore fisheries located near population centers worldwide are overexploited due to easy access to the resource from shore and small vessels. But it is simply not true that all fish stocks are in peril. For example, except for the Pacific armorhead (which was overexploited by foreign fleets prior to US management of the resource), all the fish stocks in the1.5 million square miles of mostly offshore and at times remote waters managed by the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council are considered healthy. This area includes waters 3 to 200 miles offshore Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa and waters 0 to 200 miles offshore of the Northern Marina Islands and the US Pacific remote island areas, such as Johnston, Midway and Palmyra Atolls.
To address this misperception and provide factual information, the Council has partnered with the Hawaii Department of Education and the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) to produce a three-part television series focusing on fisheries and fisheries management. The series is produced through KidScience, an interactive distance-learning program that reaches students in about three dozen states as well as the Territories of Guam and American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). The program is aired in classrooms and homes through live broadcasts from Hawaii that are replayed on local cable stations.
The three-part series will feature fisheries in American Samoa, Guam, CNMI and Hawaii, highlighting the importance of fisheries to island communities and the complexity of managing them to ensure continued use by future generations. The series, FishQuest, will answer such questions as Why do fish resources need to be managed? What fish are being caught, and how? How do the fishermen know where to find the fish? How do the scientists know how many fish are in the ocean? Fishery managers, scientists, fishermen and others will help students answer these questions.
In "Fishing for Facts," students will review the different types of fisheries and see what happens to the fish after fishing vessels catch them.
In "Fishing for Food," students will be given a real-life fishery management problem and review the different options that managers have to solve it. The teachers in the classroom will assign the students roles to play, and the students will have one week to come up with solutions.
In "Fishing for Solutions," students will review the different solutions and learn about efforts by scientists and managers to solve some difficult fisheries issues, such as the unintended catches of sea birds, sea turtles and other species by some fishing gear.
A free teacher's guide is available to enhance the learning experience. It contains lesson plans and student activities, such as crossword puzzles, word searches, a fish design, a fishery species identification exercise, a fishing gear and fish species matching game and instructions on how to do fish printing and how to design a fish trap. The guide can be obtained by logging on to www.kidscience.net.
FishQuest will air in Hawaii 8 - 9 a.m. on September 12, 19 and 26 on Hawaii Public Television. For broadcast times in other areas, please call your local cable station. For other questions about this program, please call Cindy Knapman, Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, at (808) 522-5341.
| Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council |
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The Council is the policy-making organization for the management of fisheries in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ, generally 3 - 200 miles from shore) around the Territory of American Samoa, Territory of Guam, State of Hawaii, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and U.S. Pacific island possessions – an area of nearly 1.5 million square miles. The Council is tasked with maintaining opportunities for domestic fishing while preventing adverse impacts to stocks, habitat, protected species and ecosystem resources. |
