Coastal environmental impacts on Kuwaiti fisheries

✍ Scribed by P.S. Joseph; M. Arar; I. Shalash

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 347 KB
• Volume: 213
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1573-5141
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00014994

✦ Synopsis

The bumper shrimp catches of 1983 and 1988, and inter-annual variability of finfish catches, prompted a study of the role played by the marine environment in fish production variability. The available short time series of physico-chemical data, beginning in 1982, showed a distinctive pattern of variability with a possible periodicity of five to six years. The two bumper shrimp years coincided with the trough of the time series of yearly averaged values for temperature, salinity and dissolved bottom oxygen. The catches for four commercially important Wish species were low in 1982 and high in 1984/1985. The trend in fish catches lagged by one year and showed an inverse relationship with shrimp production. The forces behind the formation of the special environmental conditions of 1983 and 1988 are assumed to be high discharge from the Shatt Al-Arab and less windforcing. It was not feasible to estimate the magnitude of the environmental relative to the effects of seasonal closure of the shrimp fisheries as the available time series are not sufficiently long, but such studies should eventually be undertaken.