Small fish slip out of nets, scattered on Qurum beach

Muscat: Large numbers of dead fish were found at Qurum beach on Wednesday morning.
The fish were discovered when an expat, among others, spotted the fish on the beach.“I was jogging on the beach this morning when I noticed a lot of dead fish on the beach. I decided to click a few pictures of them,” Tannu said.
Authorities have said this was caused by smaller fish slipping out of fishing nets and floating onto the beach.
“Some fishermen use large nets with big gaps that allow many smaller fish to be spilled onto the beach. They choose not to scoop up what is left behind. Furthermore, they can’t pick the fish up at that moment because nets are already filled with fish that are quite heavy, and they are supposed to drag the nets,” an official from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) said.
He added that fishing without legal permits and without proper fishing gear is illegal.“People are not allowed to fish without licence and they need the correct kinds of fishing nets, the kind that hold everything that they have caught, and do not spill anything. There are regulations that need to be met,” he said.
The MAF official said that leaving fish on the beach was also a pollution issue.“If fish are left on a beach for a long time, say a day or so, they decompose, and it causes an odour and pollution, too,”he added.
Earlier, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries had disclosed that as many as 2,857 cases of violations of traditional fishing laws were registered in the Sultanate in 2017, compared with 1,931 cases in 2016, and the number is continuing to rise.
He added that the other problem that occurred in fishing was the bycatch, which refers to unwanted fish and other marine creatures trapped in fishing nets.
Fishermen want to catch certain species of fish that are popular among seafood lovers. However, they end up catching all sorts of fish, turtles, ray fish, and others.
Sometimes, they dump the marine creatures that they can’t sell on the beach. This causes a problem,” he said.
On March 24, dead stingrays were found by dozens of onlookers on a beach in Seeb. Muscat Municipality had cleared the beach of the dead marine creatures.
The official said that these stingrays were part of a bycatch that was discarded by fishermen.“They discard ray fish because of their low market price,” he added. Khaled Hashmi, an oceanographer at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), agreed that bycatch being left on beaches remains a problem.