Bullet Points:
- Intensive and species-specific removal in the live reef food fish trade throughout its core range in Southeast Asia.
- Destructive fishing techniques, including bombs and cyanide as well as illegal fishing and trading.
- A developing export market for juvenile humphead wrasse for the marine aquarium trade.
- Lack of coordinated, consistent national and regional management.
- Although humphead wrasse have widespread distribution, the World Conservation Union has revealed a worrying decline in numbers. The species' total population has dropped by at least half in just 30 years, with some localized populations declining by as much as 90 percent.
CONSERVATION STEPS
- Some of the important desirable attributes of fisheries management are the precautionary approach, the ecosystem approach, adaptive management and participatory decision- making. The major difficulty is that few of the major humphead wrasse exporting countries have much functional management for small-scale commercial fisheries, not to mention these more sophisticated concepts.
- In October 2004 the humphead wrasse was listed on Appendix II of CITES. International trade of species on this list is permitted only if the export will not be detrimental to the survival of the species in the wild. For fishes, this has generally been interpreted to mean that in the exporting country there must be a functional management plan and associated monitoring.
- Various measures could be used to obtain the objectives commonly associated with the management of the humphead wrasse.
