Former rejects seen as very good catches

Another Life:As plant plankton doubles and redoubles across a sunlit sea, setting in train a hectic replenishment of ocean life, it is good - if quite incredibly overdue - to find Europe preparing to ban the dumping at sea of billions of inconveniently dead and mangled fish. The admission by the EU Fisheries Commissioner, Joe Borg, that discarding unwanted catches is "morally wrong" comes after decades of expert confirmation and outrage at the waste of marine life.

News of his intentions found me, as it happens, chewing on my share of the tail of Lophius piscatorius and wondering again just at what point the fearsomely dentured angler ceased to be discarded as a "trash fish" and became the delicious "monkfish" of modern cuisine.

"Of no commercial value", a standard British text declared of the species in 1971. Yet that can't have been quite true. A pair of Aberdeen physicians, pioneering insulin in treating diabetes almost a century ago, were extracting it from angler fish "abundantly available at the local fish market". So the Scots, at least, seem to have known better than to judge by appearances.

All kinds of fish that used to be slung into the discard chutes are now, in our desperate appetite for edible species, topped and tailed and filleted for market. The metre-long roundnose grenadier, a current staple of deep-sea bottom-trawling, was once discarded as a by-catch by French trawlers fishing for blue ling, since forbidden as a target species.

Grenadier - a former "rat-tail", though nobody calls it that now - has the big bony head, big eyes and body tapering to zero of many fish leading slow-motion lives in cold, dark pressure at around 1,000 metres. The trawl that hauls it up may arrive with 40 or 50 other species, including masses - perhaps half the catch - of "slickheads" (Alepocephalidae), watery fish with heads bare of scales for which the market, so far, has no use and which are dumped through the scuppers to the waiting kittiwakes and gannets.

Nothing, it's true, is ever wasted by nature, least of all in the ocean: every dead or mangled scrap will be eaten on its way to the sealed or recycled thereafter. But the scale of discards of over the past half-century has been a huge waste of a precious marine resource. A study published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2005 put the discard total in the North Atlantic at 1.3 million tonnes per year, or 13 per cent of the catches. To the west of Ireland and Scotland, discards have ranged from 31 to 90 per cent of catches, depending on the fleet, the target species and the depth of trawling.

After such a history, and the amount of expert discussion devoted to the problem, Commissioner Borg's sudden proposal to "start a debate" on how to cut unwanted catches can seem absurdly tentative. But he is firm enough on his goal - "for fishers to take from the sea only what can be marketed" and the first proposals for specific fisheries are to be tabled within a year.

The commission's real innovation, as Borg sees it, is in involving the fishing industry in finding ways and means of keeping to by-catch targets and landing all fish caught.

Significantly, two of the countries that have already banned discards - Iceland and Norway - have stayed outside the EU. Iceland is the shining example of flexible fishery management, with a system that can be juggled to accommodate, say, a skipper's over-quota catch of haddock by swapping or borrowing between quotas. But its end-game for fish for which there's no ready market (the Icelandic fisheries research institute buys it up) is not one likely to fit the EU, with its immensely complex mix of fisheries, species, and conservation controls.

A lot of discarding arises from the mixed nature of our fisheries, with a frequent mismatch between the size of the mesh in the trawl nets, the range of species fished for, and their permitted minimum landing size. But more ingenious fishing gear must be part of the answer, if masses of juvenile fish or forbidden species are not to be dumped at sea.

Iceland's flexible quota system is backed by a level of inspection at sea to which Ireland can only aspire. The Marine Institute collects discard data for the EU as a big part of its role in guiding sustainable fisheries.

But putting scientific observers aboard Irish mixed-fishery trawlers (this by the skippers' "goodwill") has disclosed a remarkable discrepancy between catches as recorded by the observers and those declared in the trawler logbooks kept for the EU.

On almost 80 trips in 2003 and 2004 for which direct comparisons could be made, there was "significant" under-reporting of quota-limited high-value species such as anglerfish, cod, hake and haddock, and over-reporting of unlimited fish such as whiting, ray, dogfish and conger eel. In any proposed ban on discards, the ultimate mismatch seems likely to be about trust.

Eye On Nature

A friend describes a bird she has seen in her garden as like a sparrow, but smaller, with an orange/yellow triangle on top of it's head, like a mohican. It flutters in the air a few feet away from her window, but flies off as soon as any human appears.

David Nolan, Santry, Dublin 9

It is a male goldcrest which is catching spiders around her window.

Walking on Ballytrent beach Co Wexford, I met a bird in the dunes that looked just like a blackbird, but it's beak was black. Can blackbirds have black beaks?

Heather Egan, Wexford

It was a first-year male blackbird that would soon have its yellow beak.

I regret to inform you of the demise of red squirrels due to the increasing numbers of pine martens in our woods. Several pairs of reds are now missing from their normal territory of the previous 40 years.

Sandy Perceval, Ballymote, Co Sligo