GOVERNMENT officials are working with members of Jersey’s fishing fleet to gain a better understanding of the abundance of octopuses being reported in the Island’s waters.
With a boom in the numbers of octopus throughout the English Channel and reports of sea temperatures above average levels, the Island’s head of marine resources said Environment Minister Steve Luce was “keeping a very keen eye”on the issue.
The importance being placed at government level aligns with calls, as the JEP reported last week, for Island restaurants to include octopus on their menus and for consumers to widen their repertoires beyond conventional fish and shellfish dishes.
Francis Binney, head of marine resources, said octopuses had proliferated in Channel Island water until the very cold winter of 1962/63, when numbers were wiped out as a result of freezing temperatures.
“The numbers have built back up gradually, starting in the Bay of Biscay and then around the Brest Peninsula since 2017 or 2018 and then up the Channel,” he said. “The warmer sea temperatures have allowed for a real boom, although less so in Jersey than on the south coast of England.”
Data from the UK Met Office has revealed a “marine heatwave”, with sea temperature readings along the entire west coast of the UK about 2.5°C above average, and up to 4°C in parts of Devon and Cornwall.
Jersey’s Met Office said the local data was less extreme, but that the sea temperature had been above average every month since the start of 2022 and that the provisional indication for May indicated a temperature just over 1°C above the long-term average mark of 12.4°C.
Mr Binney said that whereas sea temperatures in winter had formerly been too cold for octopuses to survive in the waters off the south coast of England, the species is now more likely to be able to survive tear-round.
He said Jersey was working together with UK scientists and as part of the cephalopod working group formed by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, as well as carrying out local monitoring.
One boat in the Jersey fleet was utilising new pots in order to help track octopus numbers, he added, with additional data coming from other boats.
“It is a developing situation ,” he said. “The Environment Minister has been keeping a very close eye on this and has tasked Marine Resorces with focusing on it to ensure the livelihoods of fishers can be protected from changes that octopuses may bring.”
It is anticipated that a report will be presented to a meeting of the Fisheries and Marine Resources Panel later this year.
