Involved Members: Prof. Kenneth Mei Yee LEUNG, Prof. Jianwen QIU

Bottom trawling has been banned in some jurisdictions to mitigate the problems of habitat destruction and overfishing. However, most reports about trawling impacts originate from temperate latitudes, and recovery of macrobenthos from trawl ban has hardly ever been studied in the tropics. In Hong Kong, to facilitate the recovery of fisheries resources and associated benthic ecosystems, the Government implemented a territory-wide trawl ban on 31 December 2012. Comparison of surveys conducted before and at 2.5 years after the ban revealed higher organic contents in sediment and lower suspended-solid loads in water, as well as a significant increase in abundance, species richness, functional diversity and among-site similarity of macrobenthos after the trawl ban. The results suggest that the imposition of a trawl ban can be an effective measure for biodiversity conservation in the tropics.

Reference:

Wang, Z., Leung, K.M.Y., Sung, Y.H., Dudgeon, D. & Qiu, J.W. (2021). Recovery of tropical marine benthos after
a trawl ban demonstrates linkage between abiotic and biotic changes. Communications Biology, 4, 212.