Protect Our Crayfish – Have Your Say
Thank you for standing up for our marine environment. Crayfish on the northeast coast – from Te Arai Point to East Cape – are again threatened.
Fisheries NZ is
proposing to increase to the commercial catch limit for crayfish, putting our taonga (treasured) species, at greater risk. Fisheries NZ’s proposal to close the inner Hauraki Gulf to crayfishing is meaningless because there are few crayfish left in those waters.
LegaSea are developing a formal submission recommending a recovery plan that includes –
- No increase to the total allowable commercial catch.
- Potential closed areas; and
- Investment in independent science to prove how many crayfish can be harvested sustainably.
Depletion is not new. Nine years ago crayfish in the Hauraki Gulf were declared functionally extinct. Since then an explosion of kina gorging on kelp has been stripping whole rocky reefs of all life. On the northeast coast kina barrens have taken over much of the seafloor.
Our crayfish are vital for restoring balance in our marine ecosystems, but again Fisheries NZ is using unverified data to justify giving away more quota to commercial interests.
This decision would benefit a few quota investors, while the environment – and our future generations – lose.
By submitting, you can help protect our crayfish and give them a fighting chance to recover.
Complete the form below to send your submission directly to Fisheries NZ. Together we can strive to protect our crayfish for generations to come.
Submissions close at 5PM, Wednesday 29 January 2025.
Related articles
March 29, 2018
Crayfish play an important role in the marine ecosystem. They are a target species for many people and a taonga, a treasure, that is important to the social, economic and cultural wellbeing of all New Zealanders. An alliance of the largest representative recreational fishing organisations in New Zealand has responded to the Ministry for Primary ... Read more.
March 27, 2018
LegaSea and the New Zealand Sport Fishing Council welcome the decision by the Minister of Fisheries Stuart Nash to reduce the allowable catch for crayfish in the Hauraki Gulf and Bay of Plenty, known as the CRA 2 region. The Minister has set the new limits for commercial fishing at 80 tonnes per year, set ... Read more.
March 22, 2018
It’s competition time and the LegaSea team has been attending a raft of events around the country, presenting the FishCare programme and gathering responses to the Crayfish Crisis campaign. In the first seven weeks after the holiday break LegaSea has been involved in activities enabling us to engage with more than 2000 people. The opportunity ... Read more.
March 10, 2018
It is encouraging that so many recreational fishers have expressed a strong desire to conserve their crayfish catch in the interests of rebuilding the CRA 2 fishery between Te Arai Point in the north and East Cape. The MPI review of four crayfish management areas is now over and we await the Minister’s decisions that ... Read more.
February 28, 2018
LegaSea awaits the Minister’s decision for the future management of four crayfish stocks by the end of March. The new catch levels for two North Island and two South Island stocks will apply from April 1st. In February our submission to the Ministry supported a major catch reduction in CRA 2, the status quo in ... Read more.
February 5, 2018
Crayfish stocks are in crisis and recreational fishers are calling for an independent review of the fisheries management system. Currently, crayfish in the CRA 2 region (which extends from Pakiri through the Hauraki Gulf to the East Cape) are at an all-time low. The latest official assessment shows that the crayfish population has been in ... Read more.
January 24, 2018
Minister’s crayfish decision Stuart Nash, Minister of Fisheries, has announced there will be commercial catch reductions in two crayfish stocks including CRA 2, from April 1st 2018. There will also be commercial catch increases for the Wellington-Hawke’s Bay region (CRA 4) and the Southern – Fiordland (CRA 8) fish stock. Recreational fishers did not support ... Read more.
January 24, 2018
“There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know”. This quote from John Heywood (1546) nicely sums up where we are at with crayfish management particularly on the northeast coast of the North Island. The CRA 2 fishery from ... Read more.
January 20, 2018
LegaSea is pleased that the Minister Stuart Nash has agreed to review the crayfish fishery on the northeast coast after years of lobbying by thousands of individuals, the New Zealand Underwater Association, and the New Zealand Sport Fishing Council. Having the CRA 2 fish stock, between Waipu and East Cape, deplete to the point where ... Read more.
October 4, 2017
Between July and September LegaSea ran a campaign – the ‘Crayfish Crisis’. It highlighted the collapse of the Crayfish 2 (CRA 2) stock and the need for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Quota Management System. This campaign was developed following the March 2017 survey of more than 800 CRA 2 fishers and divers. ... Read more.
