25: Eating cephalopods & labelling seafood with Zoe Doubleday

I have a question that is a slightly different topic, but just to cuttlefish in general.

There was a spearfisher shot a cuttlefish at a beach near me and it just, there was this like kind of all the community of like spearers and divers and people kind of up in arms being like... how could you do this? And probably it all being really heightened by cuttlefish, you know, the swimmers and the snorkels and the divers kind of knowing what's happening in South Australia and going, this is awful.

And then the fish is going, well, actually it's very sustainable to catch because it has a short lifespan.

And if you can get it at the end of the season, it's going to die anyway.

I was just curious, you know, what you...

Yeah, so I work with fishes and cephalopod fisheries, particularly on octopus.

And generally I'd say, They do have this short lifespan.

If conditions are good, they can be a good thing to fish as opposed to a fish that might live 50 years old and doesn't mature to its 20.

They can be quite adaptable to environmental change in terms of they've got this plasticity about them that they can adapt quite successfully.

But they can also be overfished and they've shown that.

In Europe, where cephalopods have been, you know, like octopuses are national food in Portugal, and they can be overfished, as we've seen in different places.

In Europe, everything's got its limits.

I mean, there's always vulnerabilities to different species.

Cephalopods do have their own vulnerability in the sense that if you wipe out one generation, there's no mum and dad around to... replenish the population but then they do have this short lifespan you know cephalopods they're carnivores so they're eating something they're not like low down the food chain they're higher up the food chain which is quite unusual because we often think of carnivores are these long-lived sharks or fish species so they need to eat you know other fish and crabs and things to survive but they do have that fast growth we do have cephalopod fisheries here in australia they're all relatively small scale compared to other Areas of the world, so they're largely sustainable and it all depends.

I mean, if you're capturing a female that's about to lay, it's always good if, you know, they've laid their eggs first, but then they will start to senesce and get jelly-like and they're probably not very good eating.

Oh,

okay.

It all just depends on how much you're catching, you know.

There's cephalopod fisheries all around the world and in themselves I don't have a problem with cephalopod fisheries.

We have seen in Gulf St. Vincent, so that's the gulf that Adelaide is in, in South Australia, is Southern Calamari, which is squid species, is one of our main commercial fish species in the area.

And that's been completely gone to zero in terms of catch rate, catch record.

So it's completely been wiped out of the gulf altogether and it's a complete fishing ban of everything They're a little bit more mobile than cuttlefish, so they might get back into the gulf, but it will be interesting to see if those squid bounce back, because we always talk about them bouncing back quickly, but that was another cephalopod species that was particularly devastated.

We know about it because of the catch records.

The animals move a bit more, and the babies move a bit more, so we might get a bit more luck on that one.

But yeah, if it's healthy populations, you know, I wouldn't, and if it's within the fishing rules, you know, catching the old cephalopod, I don't think's gonna hurt too much.

I have a question that is a slightly different topic, but just to cuttlefish in general.

There was a spearfisher shot a cuttlefish at a beach near me and it just, there was this like kind of all the community of like spearers and divers and people kind of up in arms being like... how could you do this? And probably it all being really heightened by cuttlefish, you know, the swimmers and the snorkels and the divers kind of knowing what's happening in South Australia and going, this is awful.

And then the fish is going, well, actually it's very sustainable to catch because it has a short lifespan.

And if you can get it at the end of the season, it's going to die anyway.

I was just curious, you know, what you...

Yeah, so I work with fishes and cephalopod fisheries, particularly on octopus.

And generally I'd say, They do have this short lifespan.

If conditions are good, they can be a good thing to fish as opposed to a fish that might live 50 years old and doesn't mature to its 20.

They can be quite adaptable to environmental change in terms of they've got this plasticity about them that they can adapt quite successfully.

But they can also be overfished and they've shown that.

In Europe, where cephalopods have been, you know, like octopuses are national food in Portugal, and they can be overfished, as we've seen in different places.

In Europe, everything's got its limits.

I mean, there's always vulnerabilities to different species.

Cephalopods do have their own vulnerability in the sense that if you wipe out one generation, there's no mum and dad around to... replenish the population but then they do have this short lifespan you know cephalopods they're carnivores so they're eating something they're not like low down the food chain they're higher up the food chain which is quite unusual because we often think of carnivores are these long-lived sharks or fish species so they need to eat you know other fish and crabs and things to survive but they do have that fast growth we do have cephalopod fisheries here in australia they're all relatively small scale compared to other Areas of the world, so they're largely sustainable and it all depends.

I mean, if you're capturing a female that's about to lay, it's always good if, you know, they've laid their eggs first, but then they will start to senesce and get jelly-like and they're probably not very good eating.

Oh,

okay.

It all just depends on how much you're catching, you know.

There's cephalopod fisheries all around the world and in themselves I don't have a problem with cephalopod fisheries.

We have seen in Gulf St. Vincent, so that's the gulf that Adelaide is in, in South Australia, is Southern Calamari, which is squid species, is one of our main commercial fish species in the area.

And that's been completely gone to zero in terms of catch rate, catch record.

So it's completely been wiped out of the gulf altogether and it's a complete fishing ban of everything They're a little bit more mobile than cuttlefish, so they might get back into the gulf, but it will be interesting to see if those squid bounce back, because we always talk about them bouncing back quickly, but that was another cephalopod species that was particularly devastated.

We know about it because of the catch records.

The animals move a bit more, and the babies move a bit more, so we might get a bit more luck on that one.

But yeah, if it's healthy populations, you know, I wouldn't, and if it's within the fishing rules, you know, catching the old cephalopod, I don't think's gonna hurt too much.