Latest news with #pāua
RNZ News
22-07-2025
- RNZ News
Man found with over 600 pāua gets prison time
Photo: RNZ/Marika Khabazi A 63-year-old Porirua man found with over 600 pāua has been sent to prison for more than 2 years. Ruteru Sufia was sentenced in the Porirua District Court today on four charges under the Fisheries Act and one charge under the Fisheries (Amateur Fishing) Regulations. The Court also banned him from all forms of fishing for three years. In 2022, 65 whole and 554 shucked pāua were found in Sufia's freezers by Fishery Officers. "This was a large amount of pāua, more than 60 times the daily catch limit and more than 30 times the accumulation limit," Fisheries New Zealand Regional Manager, Fisheries Compliance, Phil Tasker said. He said 45 of the pāua found were undersize and Sufia claimed the pāua in his freezer was for a wedding in Auckland. It was an explanation the court didn't believe. While on bail on charges related to those pāua, Sufia was caught with a further 48 pāua, with 29 less than the minimum legal size. "Sufia intended to sell this seafood, which is also illegal. We have zero tolerance for poachers - they affect the sustainability of our shared fisheries, and they affect people who legitimately trade in seafood," he said. "When we find evidence of illegal fishing - you can be assured that we will investigate and depending on the circumstances, place the matter before the court," Tasker said. He said Sufia has a long record of breaking fisheries rules, with more than 35 offences dealt with by MPI over a number of years.
RNZ News
27-06-2025
- RNZ News
Fishermen caught with more than 1800 pāua in Porirua facing charges
A fifth of the1863 pāua fishery officers discovered on a vessel. Photo: Supplied / Fisheries New Zealand A pair of fishers are likely to face charges after being caught with more than 1800 pāua in Porirua. The pāua was seized by fishery officers based in Wellington earlier this week. "While inspecting a vessel shortly after it landed at Titahi Bay on Tuesday afternoon, fishery officers discovered 1863 pāua, which had already been shucked," Fisheries New Zealand regional Manager Phil Tasker said. The estimated retail value of the pāua was approximately $25,000. Tasker said it was one of the biggest hauls of illegally harvested pāua in recent times. "There is a maximum daily limit of five pāua per fisher in this area, which gives some context to the scale of this offending, and the potential damage it could do to the pāua population." The case is still under investigation, but Tasker said the two men in possession of the shellfish were likely to face charges under the Fisheries Act. He said it was incredibly disappointing to see offending of this scale. "This fishery is a shared resource, and the rules are there to protect its sustainability for everyone. Our message for those who think they can steal this shared resource is that we will pursue offending and there will be consequences." Tasker said most fishers wanted to follow the rules. "The best way to stay on top of the rules for the area you're fishing or gathering shellfish in is to download the free NZ Fishing Rules mobile app," he said. The Ministry for Primary Industries encouraged people to report suspected illegal activity through the ministry's 0800 4 POACHER number (0800 47 62 24). Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Otago Daily Times
26-06-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Texts and emails help sink illegal Southland fishing ring
Text and emails helped uncover an illegal seafood black market in Southland which has resulted in fines of almost $37,000. Commercial fishers Michael Noel Hawke (61), Stuart Teiwi Ryan (48) and Peter George Fletcher (32) were sentenced in the Invercargill District Court after pleading guilty to multiple charges under the Fisheries Act. Another man, Duncan William Davis (39) was sentenced on two charges for illegally selling a large amount of kina, some pāua and blue cod, following a successful prosecution by the Ministry for Primary Industries. Mr Hawke was fined $6000, Mr Ryan $13,000, Mr Fletcher $3900, and Mr Davis $14,000. The prosecution was part of a larger 2023 investigation into illegal sales of kina, pāua, crayfish, blue cod and oysters. Fishery Officers gathered evidence of the illegal sales by studying seafood landing records and electronic communications between the fishers, black-market suppliers and potential buyers, MPI said in a statement. The electronic communications included text messages, emails, and messages on other platforms. 'Our investigation found Mr Hawke sold about 1000 dredge oysters during the 2023 season that were not part of his allowable commercial take. They were his allowable recreational take and should have been in his landing report," Fisheries New Zealand district manager Greg Forbes said. 'Based on 2023 prices of $37 a dozen, the oysters were valued at more than $3,000. Bluff is the only wild oyster fishery in the world and selling fish illegally has a serious effect on sustainability.' The investigation found a deckhand aboard the fishing vessel was also selling his allowable recreational catch. 'Mr Ryan was found to have sold 114 crayfish and about 40 blue cod. Crayfish retails at about $140 a kg and blue cod $75 a kg. Mr Ryan made around $2,250 in illegal earnings. 'Most commercial fishers follow the rules because they want their fishery to remain sustainable into the future – black-market sales of recreational catch is a slap in the face to the majority of commercial fishers who do the right thing.' Electronic evidence found Mr Davis, who is not a commercial fisher, sold seafood including up to 400 punnets of kina roe, some pāua and blue cod on the black market he had either caught, or bought from Mr Ryan to resell. 'This was up to $5000 of kina that was sold illegally and finfish valued at about $2000. This was deliberate and the motivation was simply to make money.' Fishery Officers found the third commercial fisher, Mr Fletcher, sold about 200 dredge oysters illegally on about six occasions. - APL
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Shimmering with an opal shine: New Zealand's unique blue pearls face threat of warming seas
Roger Beattie was diving off the Chatham Islands, about 800km east of New Zealand, when he saw his first pāua pearl. Beattie was familiar with pāua, the Māori word for abalone, and their iridescent shells of shimmering purples and greens. But the pearl that had formed inside was unlike anything he had ever seen, gleaming with layers of the pāua's natural colours. 'I just thought 'heck, that would make amazing jewellery,'' Beattie says. That was in the early 1990s, and Beattie soon started experimenting ways of farming pāua, and creating pearls in the shell. A decade later, he began selling the so-called blue pearls commercially. Now, a small industry exists in New Zealand cultivating the unique gems. They are rare, with only a handful of companies running farms, each producing only a few thousand pāua pearls each year. But the delicate operations are being made more complicated as changing conditions and warming seas alter the environments pāua need to survive. 'Warm waters cause physiological stress to the pāua,' says Shawn Gerrity, an ecologist at the University of Canterbury who has studied the pāua. There are four species of pāua endemic to New Zealand. The blackfoot pāua is the biggest species, known for its vibrant shell and succulent flesh. All cultivated pāua pearls come from the blackfoot pāua. The pearls appear shades of blue, turquoise, purple and green. 'Only this abalone, in this water, produces such an unusual colour of pearl,' says Jacek Pawlowski, a jeweller in Akaroa, a seaside town southeast of Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island. He has worked with the pearls for the last 25 years. 'They have that rainbow, opal shine, no pearl is exactly the same,' Pawlowski says. Many of the world's pearls come from freshwater mussels in China, while more valuable Akoya pearls primarily come from Japan. Black and golden 'South Sea' pearls are cultivated in Australia and around the Pacific. In New Zealand, making farmed pāua pearls is delicate and labour-intensive. As juveniles, pāua are taken out of the water, where their flesh is pried up and a small implant placed under their shell for a pearl to form on. If their soft bodies are nicked, the pāua will bleed to death, so the process must be gentle. Only one in five pāua will create a jewellery-grade gem, Beattie says. Each mollusc needs to be fed vast quantities of kelp and live in water about 16 degrees for the three to four years it takes for a pearl to form. To keep the pāua cool, Beattie's farm is towards the mouth of Akaroa Harbour, with colder water from the open ocean. Arapawa Pearls, in the Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island, keeps its pāua in tanks to create a constant temperature. But rising ocean temperatures pose a threat to their survival. Sea surface temperatures around New Zealand have increased 0.16 to 0.26C per decade since 1982, according to official statistics. Marine heatwaves have dramatically increased in frequency around New Zealand, with a particularly severe event in 2017/18 causing thousands of sea creatures to die. Increased marine temperatures have caused mass die-offs of abalone species in other areas of the world, like California, where warming water has reduced abalone's access to food and sped up the transmission of a withering disease. Beattie has had an algal bloom – which is more likely in warm water – kill a harvest of pāua by depriving them of oxygen. Gerrity says marine heatwaves 'destroy habitats'. 'When kelp is degraded, sea urchins survive, and it's hard to get pāua back,' he says. Gerrity has researched the recovery of pāua in Kaikōura, on the north-east coast of the South Island, where thousands of pāua died after the sea floor was lifted six metres in a 2016 earthquake. Nine years later, with careful management, the population is healthy again. It is a model for what could happen if a heatwave caused similar pāua deaths, but there's still a lot of risk. Dr Norman Ragg, senior shellfish scientist at science organisation Cawthron Institute, says pāua are a 'really interesting quirk of nature', that have remained unchanged for millennia. While New Zealand's populations are still healthy, there is no room for complacency. 'There are a lot of bad news stories about abalone around the world – they are a large, tasty, shallow-water, easy-to-catch sea snail that breeds and grows slowly and that puts a lot of burden of responsibility back on to [New Zealand].' Ragg believes cultivating blue pearls could go some way to bolstering appreciation for pāua and securing its future in the face of climate change. Looking over his Akaroa shellfish farm, Beattie says he will continue to 'work with nature' to ensure the pāua and their pearls continue to thrive. 'It's almost impossible to improve on what nature makes. The pāua have to be not just healthy, but happy,' he says.
