As the research leader of Australia’s Tuna Champions program, Associate Professor Sean Tracey knew it had been a success when he discovered recreational fishers teaching each other the best way to care for their catch of Southern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus maccoyii). 

‘If people are not taking ice on the boat, someone will actually comment “you should take some ice, look after the fish, and have you heard about Tuna Champions?”,’ says A/Prof Tracey. 

He is based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, at the University of Tasmania, and helped to launch the Tuna Champions campaign five years ago, in collaboration with the Australian Recreational Fishing Foundation. 

Tuna Champions is a grassroots education campaign supported by high-profile fishing personalities, celebrity chefs, sporting stars, charter operators and recreational fishers and it has spread the word that Southern Bluefin Tuna is a resource worth nurturing and respecting.  

The program has used in-person and social media messaging to generate a high level of engagement with the recreational fishing community and there are early indications of behaviour change. 

Now there’s a push to expand it not just to other species of tuna, but to other recreationally fished species as well as sharks and rays. 

Research to engagement

FRDC has helped fund the Tuna Champions program, to educate recreational Bluefin Tuna fishers about how to care both for the fish they catch and the fish they release.  

It evolved out of work that A/Prof Tracey had been doing with the recreational fishing sector looking at how Southern Bluefin Tuna survived after being caught and released.  

After spending time with recreational fishers around Australia, A/Prof Tracey says he realised that there were some gaps in fishers’ understanding about how to handle caught fish to preserve the meat in the best possible condition, and also how to improve the chances of a released fish surviving.  

Some key messages in handling Southern Bluefin Tuna include: 

• brain-spike and bleed fish as quickly as possible if you intend to keep the catch 
• store the fish in plenty of ice 
• keep only what you intend to eat 
• if you intend to release a fish, keep it in the water as much as possible 
• keep water moving over its gills to improve its chance of survival. 

But recreational fishers often have their own ways of doing things. One of the biggest challenges was how to achieve behaviour change in such a diverse and passionate community.  

That’s where the idea of Tuna Champions was born. A/Prof Tracey wanted the behaviour change to be driven within the sector, not imposed on it.  

‘That’s why it had its own brand’, he says. ‘We want to make sure that we’re getting ambassadors from the sector to drive it as champions of change, and really push the messaging out from within the sector that this is a good thing to do’. 

High-profile recreational fisher and TV star Al McGlashan is one of the champions of change. While filming the bluefin tuna documentary Life on the Line, he became aware of a knowledge gap between commercial and recreational fishers – himself included – about how to handle the tuna. He wanted to do better as an individual and as part of the recreational fishing community.  

‘It’s not a right to catch them, it’s an absolute privilege’, he says. ‘So, you can't catch them and waste them, you can't catch them and dump them, or weigh them and throw them out.’  

Mr McGlashan says most fishers want to do the right thing by this precious resource, and he has found anglers were receptive to learning when he spoke to them on behalf of Tuna Champions. ‘We want to do everything we can to make it better and we can't do it unless we get everyone on board’, he says. 

The program has also made use of social media because recreational fishers are often very active in these spaces. 

‘Particularly in these niche fisheries like bluefin, that are quite seasonal in their movements, a lot of the main guys that target these species will follow social media quite closely to see where schools are and where fishers are going’, A/Prof Tracey says.  

Tuna Champions is active on social media and has its own social media presence with a Facebook page, YouTube channel and Instagram feed, which combined have over 10,000 followers.  

At the same time, the program worked with media outlets such as Blue Water magazine, which is read by a large number of recreational fishers. 

Fishers teaching fishers

Most gratifying for A/Prof Tracey has been the ‘snowballing’ of its own accord. Its messages have spread through the recreational fishing community, starting with the most avid fishers.  

‘They're the ones that do this a lot, they have a real passion and interest in doing it, so they tend to follow the news about it’, he says. This group is likely to have the biggest impact because they fish the most, they catch the most fish and they have the most followers on social media due to their experience in the fishery.  

Getting this group of dedicated recreational fishers on board had an additional benefit. ‘They're teaching their friends, who might only go out once or twice in their life or maybe a year’, A/Prof Tracey says. ‘They're instilling good practices and they're communicating that back to others. We didn't necessarily need to target the really infrequent fishers, as hopefully they are learning good behaviours from their experienced peers.’ 

Australian sports fisher and TV personality Paul Worsteling is another champion of change in the Tuna Champions program. He got involved because he saw the program as a way to cut through with a strong message about caring for Southern Bluefin Tuna. ‘There is just such an information overload that we need to keep telling the same story again and again and again and again for people to finally understand it’, he says.  

Initially, Mr Worsteling found some resistance among recreational fishers to the program’s message. ‘The story is if you're fortunate enough to go out and catch a Southern Bluefin Tuna, it is an absolute privilege’, he says. ‘That privilege has come about because people have done research, and people have bought the Southern Bluefin Tuna back from the brink of extinction.’  

When he started talking to recreational fishers about how to make the most of this privilege, some wondered why they should bother when they only used the fish for shark burley.  

‘I now see them taking on the Tuna Champion protocols because they just see how incredible that change is’, he says. ‘It takes time, but I'd like to think in a decade, people wouldn't treat a tuna any other way.’ 

He may be right. Sean Tracey and colleagues have been surveying a random sample of recreational bluefin tuna fishers around the country as part of a broader research project that gave them the opportunity to look more closely at the effects of the Tuna Champions program. What they have found so far is encouraging.  

‘We've got a positive response of behavioural change’, he says. A good number of respondents report that they have changed how they handle Southern Bluefin Tuna. ‘That ties in with the anecdotal evidence we're seeing on social media, where that snowball effect is starting to happen’, A/Prof Tracey notes. 

With the early success of Tuna Champions, there’s interest in expanding the program to other fish species. FRDC has invested in ‘Tuna Champions 2.0: Bluefin and beyond’, which will not only include other species, but it will also help extend the program’s geographic reach.  

‘In states like New South Wales, the bluefin traditionally only show up for a month or so’, he says. ‘We have reach in NSW, but nowhere near the reach that we have in some of the southern states where the bluefin hang around a lot longer’”  

The new funding will extend the program to include tuna species such as Yellowfin (Thunnus albacares) and Longtail (Thunnus tonggol), which are commonly fished on the east and west coasts, and in northern Australia, in the case of Longtail. 

Shark safety

As well as attracting international interest, the Tuna Champions approach has helped guide an initiative that aims to reduce the harm caused to sharks and rays caught as recreational bycatch. The Shark Mates program is a joint initiative of Monash University, VR Fish (the organisation for Victorian Recreational Fishers), Victorian Fisheries Authority, Flinders University and FRDC. It aims to educate recreational fishers about how to handle a shark or ray to give the fish the best possible chance of survival after release. 

Marine biologist Associate Professor Richard Reina from Monash University has been working with sharks and fisheries for many years to understand the stress animals suffer when they get caught by fisher. He and colleagues have been studying the effects of capture and release on sharks and rays, both in experimental ‘semi-captive’ settings and on fishing vessels.  

‘We found that the outcomes for these discarded animals were often pretty poor, including negative reproductive consequences’, A/Prof Reina says. Even lifting a large shark out of the water for a photo can do significant damage to its internal organs, especially for female sharks, he explains.  

Those findings are also relevant to both commercial and recreational fishers. Sharks and rays are vulnerable to population decline because of their long lifespans and low reproductive output. One of the Shark Mates messages is not to prolong the capture by taking photos. If a photo really needs to be taken, fishers should photograph the shark in the water before releasing, rather than hauling it onto the boat.  

In an interaction with sharks, A/Prof Reina says the potential for fishers to injure themselves is quite high, and the potential for them to unintentionally cause a lot of harm to the animal is likewise quite high.  

Informed by his research, Shark Mates has created an education resource for recreational fishers shared through social media – including a YouTube channel – and information guides that are distributed to members of VR Fish. ‘What we've got so far says that people find the information useful; we get plenty of hits on the channel, we get plenty of visits to the website’, he says.  

As with the Tuna Champions program, it is the fishers themselves who are driving the changes in behaviour, underpinned by a research-backed understanding of best practice and better fishing outcomes.  

FRDC RESEARCH CODE: 2021-086, 2018-042, 2017-123 

More information: A/Prof Sean Tracey Sean.Tracey@utas.edu.au