Coral Sea

Fishing in the Coral Sea

Gallery viewing tips: Move your cursor over the image to read photo captions. If you would like to manually move through the gallery, use either the plus or minus symbols, or select an individual image by clicking on the numbers at the bottom of the gallery. This gallery requires that the Flash 9 Player be installed in your browser.

The world’s oceans are in trouble. Fishery after fishery is collapsing due to industrial scale overfishing combined with poor management by regulatory agencies.

Ninety per cent of the biomass of the world’s large predatory ocean fish have been wiped out in the last 50 years. Overfishing of yellowfin and bigeye tuna  is a major concern throughout the Central and Western Pacific. Even in the Coral Sea, both these species are in decline due to overfishing.

Over 100 tonnes of shark are taken each year from Australia’s Coral Sea as tuna fishing “bycatch”. The carcasses are landed and finned, and the fins exported to Asia.

And it’s not just fish that are affected by overfishing.  Longline hooks set for tuna and billfish also catch seabirds and threatened sea turtles. A protected, no-take park in the Coral Sea would offer a safe haven for large predatory ocean fish, seabirds and turtles and the chance to help them survive.