The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Drop in fish catch following tsunami

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 08, 2005

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Drop in fish catch following tsunami

By Shakeel M.Rasheed

KAKINADA, JAN. 7. While a boat owner at the GMC Balayogi Fish Landing Centre at Bhairavapalem gleefully pockets the Rs.25,500 that a gravid (a live female black tiger prawn carrying eggs) he nets at sea fetches, other fishermen in the background auction their own similar prize catches crying "Rs. 5, 100... Rs.5, 200... "

Representatives of the hatchery units in the aquaculture sector, anxious to replenish their brooding stock after the disruption that the tsunami had caused in their supplies, lap up the few gravids that land on the shore for spawning in their farms.

Poor catch

The fishermen pleaded against the gravids' sale being made public for they fear that it would present a misleading picture of everything being hunky dory here in the aftermath of the tsunami attack. Gravid catches are few and far between, they averred, and "fortunate are the ones who catch them."

Further up the jetty, scores of fishermen, who had their first voyage after the tsunami had tied them down to the shore for nearly 10 days, emptied their nets and lamented their catches. "This is hardly enough to even serve as a meal for our families. We spent Rs.4,000 on fuel for the voyage and what we have caught would get us only Rs.300 or Rs.400 in the market." Most of the mechanised vessels here had gone in hunt of the valued black tiger shrimp "but they seem to have disappeared."

This was the familiar scene along the coast, more so in the mangrove regions, where fishermen largely depend on estuarine fisheries. "Catches are not like what they were before the tsunami struck the coast," cried many fishermen, foxed by sudden turnaround in their fishing fortunes. Has the tsunami messed up their fishing grounds?

Major fluctuation

Professor of fisheries and aquaculture in Andhra University's Department of Zoology, D.E. Babu, who visited many of the fish landing centres in East Godavari, said "Preliminary evaluation does indicate that there is not much landing of estuarine fish and a perceptible drop in sea catches after the tsunami. Juveniles and larvae of shrimp, which migrate to the estuarine waters could have suffered mass mortality due to sudden fluctuation in the salinity level and by drifting to very low saline water under the impact of the tsunami."

"What else can be the reason then? At this time of the year, we make a good killing with our fishing," said V. Surya Rao at Pedavalasa, a fishing hamlet in the Corangi mangrove that lives off completely on the crabs that they bait our scoop out from the estuarine waters for markets that stretch up Visakhapatnam, Chennai and even Singapore. But the small crabs that he had brought home now would hardly tickle the palate of any crab eater.

Crab grounds hit

A fellow fisherman, K. Gangaraju, is as baffled by the situation saying "It appears the tsunami has played havoc with the crab grounds. The waters have been rendered very muddy; maybe the crabs have gone into hiding. I spent Rs.70 on the bait but got crabs worth only about Rs.120. Normally, we would have got catches Rs.200 to Rs.400 a boat per day."

At Pallam islet--deep into the mangrove region--fishermen live on the edge of the water. P. Satyam, who claims to have been flooded up to the shoulders by the tsunami while in the estuary, said a semblance of normal life was just returning to this hamlet: men venturing to making quick voyages with their catamarans, the local fish market making a sort a revival with mugils, gobids, sea bass, eels and Indian salmon and the women back to their traditional chores of lending value-addition to the catches by `smoking' them in their huts. "But the landings have not been normal after the tsunami. Even the sea has not completely regained its usual state completely. We still sense swells," he said.

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