Representatives from 6 of the Top conch producing countries in the Caribbean and Central America including Belize met at the Biltmore to talk about sustainable queen conch harvesting. Countries like Honduras, Nicaragua, Columbia are members of the Western Central Atlantic Fisheries Commission and the main focus of this workshop is to develop a standardized queen conch monitoring system. We dropped by to find out more.
Mauro Gongora, Fisheries Officer
"This is a regional workshop that is being organized by the Western Central Atlantic Fisheries Commission of the food and agriculture commission, Belize Fisheries Department is the organization that is executing this workshop."
"The objective of the workshop is to review the methodology that each of these countries are utilizing to conduct assessments of their queen conch population in their countries and so what is the purpose of the review is for us to come together a region, Caribbean region and Central American region and after reviewing our methodology, we hope to harmonize a methodology on how to conduct this assessment as you know queen conch is second most important fisheries commodity throughout the Caribbean and in Central America as well and so we want to ensure that the work we do in Belize, similar work is being done in other countries so we can compare our results and to look at patterns of how queen conch fisheries are performing in these countries and also in Belize."
Elizabeth Babcock, Associate Professor, University of Miami, Department of Marine Biology and Fisheries
"This is kind of a unique workshop we have not gotten to standardize methods in this way before so we have meetings where people will get together from countries to talk about the science in fisheries management fairly often but to have one that is targeted on just conch survey methods, this is kind of a new idea."
The workshop ends on Thursday.
Email
Print