Conservationists on Wednesday urged the Penghu County Government to ban the capture of Hemicentrotus pulcherrimus sea urchins.
The Maritime Citizen Foundation and the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan said that their volunteer divers only found two specimens — near Jianshan (尖山) — when they surveyed the waters near the archipelago.
The groups estimated that the number of sea urchins living in the area has fallen from 200 million about 50 years ago to about 50,000 today.
Photo courtesy of the Maritime Citizen Foundation and the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan
Even though whole sea urchins have largely disappeared from local markets, some fishers might catch them illegally, they said.
The county government’s conservation efforts are understaffed and therefore cannot enforce the regulations in place, foundation director-general Wang Hsiao-chan (王曉嬋) said.
If Penghu does not enact a ban soon, the maritime ecosystem off its coast would collapse, Wang said.
Society deputy director-general Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) said that an efficient sea urchin conservation scheme would include fishing licenses that define quotas and a cap on the number of sea urchins that can be caught per year in a defined area.
An efficient scheme would also restrict when and where sea urchins can be caught, and what kind of boats fishers can use, Chen said.
Even though Penghu in 2007 set some restrictions, the local sea urchin population continued to decline sharply until at least 2018, when the county government shortened the fishing season from four months to two months, she said.
However, the restrictions do not restrict the area for fishing, and do not require fishers to obtain licenses and that they disclose how many sea urchins they have caught, she said, adding that those shortcomings render the current conservation scheme unenforceable.
Sea urchins are in such high demand that the whole adult population is usually depleted half a month after the season starts, she said.
A better protection scheme for sea urchins, which feed on seaweed, would also increase coral reef health, Chen added.
She said Penghu should emulate a scheme Pingtung County in 2005 implemented in Kenting National Park, where a survey in 2017 showed that there were on average 16.8 sea urchins per square meter, nearly matching its record sea urchin population density of 17 animals per square meter in 1984.
Sea urchin fishing should be banned off Penghu and people should refrain from eating the animals, the groups said.
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