WWF Cover photo - Soufriere Marine Management Association ...

16. Gear closures in BritainBritain does not have a history of using no-take marine reserves for either conservation or fisheries management.It has just two Statutory Marine Nature Reserves (SMNRs), although legislation has existed for their designationsince 1981 (Jones 1999). There are no legal no-take marine reserves in UK waters, although the first is nowbeing planned in Lundy Island SMNR off the coast of southern England. However, there are a number ofrestricted areas for mobile fishing gears and we look at the effects of two of them here.Isle of Man closed area to mobile gearIn 1989 a 2km 2 area off the southwest coast of the Isle and Man, in the Irish Sea, was closed to trawling anddredging. The area was closed for research purposes by staff from the nearby Port Erin Marine Laboratory. Thesurrounding area is an important fishing ground for scallops, Pecten maximus, and prior to closure the area wasintensively fished for scallops. The area around the closure is still one of the most heavily dredged in the IrishSea (Bradshaw et al. 2001).Since mobile gear was excluded, researchers have monitored the effects of protection from dredging usingunderwater visual transects of scallops and dredge and grab samples. Bradshaw et al. (2001) compared scalloppopulations and bottom communities with those in adjacent fished areas, and with areas within the closed areathat were experimentally dredged. They found that scallop populations increased dramatically in the closed areafrom less than 2 per 200m 2 in 1989 to nearly 15 scallops per 200m 2 in 2000. Scallops also increased in the fishedarea from approximately 2 per 200m 2 in 1989 to approximately 10 scallops per 200m 2 in 2000. Scallop numberswere consistently higher in the protected area compared to the unprotected area, and scallops in the protectedarea were larger and older than those in the fished sites. In 1999 after ten years of protection, the mean age ofscallops inside the closed areas was 6.5 years compared to 5.3 years outside. In the closed area the modal agecategories were 6 and 7 years, whereas for the fished area modal ages were 4 and 5. Data presented by Bradshawet al. (2001) from a study of the age structure of the local scallop population at the beginning of the scallopFishing boats in the Isle ofMan.fishery (Tang 1941) give an indication of the rate of recovery of the population. At that time the average scallopwas 9.9 years old. A similar result was found for an area of the Skomer Marine Nature Reserve in Wales which89