Downloads/outputs

Available in open access: Musschoot T., Boden G. & Snoeks J., 2021. Identification guide to the Clupeiformes of the inland waters of Africa. Zoological Documentation Series, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. 149 pp.

Rough Guide to the Inland Fishes of Mozambique (excluding Lake Malawi): click here for the draft version.

This (very) rough guide is meant as a working document to develop a state of the art guide to the inland fishes of Mozambique. This has been a collaborative effort of the FishBase-for-Africa team and Érica Tovela (Museu de História Natural, Maputo, Mozambique). Plans were being developed to continue this effort with colleagues from SAIAB (Makhanda, South Africa) and others. However, this effort is put on hold because of the lack of people and financial means.

Fact sheets on African freshwater fisheries species:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) produces a number of Aquatic Species Fact Sheets. For these, they compile key information on various subjects and present this in a customised template under various headings. At present these series contain about 520 fact sheets (FAO Fisheries & Aquaculture). In these, however, only four species, Clarias gariepinus, Lates niloticus, Oreochromis niloticus and O. mossambicus, can be found that are of importance to inland fisheries in Africa.

This sparked our interest to produce fact sheets for important African freshwater fisheries species, based on the FAO template. Some twenty species were selected in such a way that they represent important fisheries species from a variety of taxonomic groups and geographic regions. This will allow the user to get familiarised in a quick and coherent way with the most important information available on these species.

For some species that are reported to be important, the FAO-data appeared to be wrong or incomplete, or differs between data sources. For others, surprisingly little information is available. It is important to note that the data reported by FAO are those reported by the individual countries, and only when these are lacking or considered unreliable, estimates on the best information available are made (https://www.fao.org/fishery/en/collection/capture?lang=en).

During our compiling efforts, it has become clear that there is still a long way to go in order to get the necessary insight in African inland fisheries; one can find more specific information in the fact sheets per species.

First problematic level is the lack of adequate reporting of African inland catches. For some countries, the total catch data are simply not accurate, and the catch is split up in categories that are often of too broad a scale to be meaningful. Even when efforts are done to split up catches in biologically meaningful entities, then important species are sometimes only reported on a genus or family-level basis, imposing additional assumptions for further interpretation of the data. We also found species to be reported from regions where they do not occur.

The second problematic level is the enormous lack of information in the peer-reviewed literature. Often details are only available in the grey literature and reports, and obvious errors pass by unnoticed.

The last lesson learned is perhaps the most important. African inland fisheries are in a dire state. During our literature review we rarely came across information that pointed at a healthy sustainable fishery. When Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE) data were available, they nearly always indicated a steady but certain decrease in CPUE values, often coupled with clearly dwindling catches. A few exceptions were noticed, mostly in aquatic systems that are already in a disturbed stage and have made a switch to a dominance of r-strategists (e.g. increasing catches of R. argentea in Lake Victoria, the dominance of E. sardella in Lake Malawi catches or the shift to S. tanganicae as the main fishery in southern Lake Tanganyika following heavy fishing pressure on L. stappersii).