Across New Zealand there is a concerning trend of spatial fishery closures in response to the local depletion of species vulnerable to shore-based harvest. As our population grows and interest in wild foraging increases, formerly abundant coastal species are now experiencing systematic overharvest. While pressures are concentrated near major urban centres such as Auckland, similar patterns are increasingly evident along remote coastlines. These species and the ecosystems that support them are usually highly important to local communities and customary fisheries.
Some increasingly harvested species have not normally been part of the typical recreational catch. Cat’s eyes, limpets, and similar intertidal species have become common targets, and because they are small and were once abundant, their ecological importance is often overlooked. The lack of species specific bag limits for many of these taxa contributes to overharvest, as fishers may not realise that they fall under the combined daily limit of 50 for all unlisted shellfish (e.g. crabs, cat’s eyes, cook’s turban, limpets, periwinkles, starfish). Even when limits are followed, the ease of access and the sheer number of harvesters visiting some sites on every low tide have driven localised collapses. In several locations, rock pools that were once rich with life have been stripped bare, leaving only barren reef.
Another concerning consequence of this harvesting is the damage it can cause to critical habitats that support key life cycle stages of species such as pāua. For example, juvenile pāua (up to ~80 mm) occupy the undersides of boulders in shallow water. Wading harvesters that turn over boulders in search of shellfish can disturb sensitive habitats and cause juvenile pāua mortality, potentially affecting population resilience and recruitment.
The pathway to closures
The high importance of these fisheries to tangata whenua underpins the most common mechanism for temporary closures, which is under sections 186A and 186B of the Fisheries Act. Section 186A (North Island) enables the Minister to impose closures, method restrictions, or species specific prohibitions to support tangata whenua in improving the size and abundance of fisheries resources or recognising customary practices. Section 186B provides similar powers for South Island fisheries.
Several recently implemented or extended section 186 closures from the past two years are listed in the table on the following page, and there is usually a steady stream of new applications responding to emerging areas of concern. Although each closure responds to specific local concerns and species, they have all been implemented due to localised recreational overharvesting of easily accessible inshore species.
Of particular note is the recent high profile application by Ngāti Manuhiri who sought a prohibition on harvesting all invertebrate and seaweed species from the intertidal zone to one metre depth along Auckland’s east coast, including the Hauraki Gulf Islands within the Rodney and Hibiscus Coast boundaries. This area includes the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, where both local communities and iwi have expressed growing alarm at the ongoing decimation of intertidal ecosystems. This application was approved by the Minister on the 16th of February and comes into force on the 12th of March.
Such fisheries closures are not just localised to the Auckland metro area, but extend to the South Island as well. For example, while not a s186 application, a similar recent example on the South Island, is that Ngāti Wheke (Rāpaki) have recently proposed sweeping fishery regulations to protect declining species in Whakaraupō/Lyttleton Harbour Mātaitai, including protections of previously unlisted shellfish species. The trend seems clear – where urban populations are expanding, local species vulnerable to shore-based harvest are declining.
A common feature of s186 restrictions is that they are almost always repeatedly rolled over for the maximum two year period, often indefinitely. This pattern suggests that the legislated timeframe is too short, in biological terms, to allow meaningful replenishment of depleted species. It may also indicate that ongoing environmental stressors are constraining natural recovery, even in the absence of fishing pressure. Regardless of the cause, the persistence of these renewals shows that current closure mechanisms are not achieving their intended outcomes. This highlights the need for a fundamental shift in how vulnerable shared fisheries are managed if we are to reverse the growing trend of systematic closures around New Zealand’s coastlines
In many cases, temporary closures are used as a stop gap measure to protect a fishery while longer term management solutions are developed. However, history shows that without strong political will, these solutions are rarely prioritised. Instead, temporary closures are extended year after year, effectively substituting for meaningful management action.
The point of this article is not to diminish the importance of the rights or ability of tangata whenua to request closures or restrictions around their fisheries, but to highlight the rapidly increasing number of applications that should be resolved by more appropriate management in the first place.
Displacement of fishing effort perpetuates the issue
A primary concern with fisheries closures is the displacement of fishing effort. When an area is closed or restricted, people rarely stop fishing—they simply move to the nearest open location. Without proactive adjustments to management settings in adjacent areas (such as daily bag limits or minimum legal sizes), this displacement inevitably drives further localised depletion and can conceivably set off a cascade of successive closures along the coastline. This pattern is frequently acknowledged in section 186 applications, and in some cases is even cited as a reason for seeking a closure. Such dynamics pose a serious threat to fisheries sustainability and undermine the ability of New Zealanders to access and utilise coastal marine resources.
Concentrating displaced fishing effort into neighbouring areas can quickly lead to localised depletion of key species, particularly sedentary broadcast spawning taxa such as shellfish, the very species these closures are intended to protect. Because these species move little and rely on dense spawning aggregations for successful fertilisation and population renewal, even modest increases in harvest pressure can have disproportionate impacts. For example, pāua recruitment occurs over scales of only hundreds of metres, meaning that once a local population is fished below a critical threshold, recovery can be extremely slow or may never occur.
We should also recognise that fishery declines are not driven by fishing pressure alone. There is a growing awareness of the impacts of changing environmental stressors on marine ecosystems and fisheries, especially warming water, marine heatwaves, terrestrially derived sedimentation and the increased frequency of severe storm events. Sedimentation events, for example, can smother habitats, kill invertebrates, and inhibit recruitment, leading to localised population collapse. When closures are implemented, managers may overlook these broader drivers and rely solely on natural recovery under reduced fishing pressure. In many cases, however, active restoration or mitigation of environmental impacts will be required to support meaningful stock rebuilding
A way forward to better management
consistent root cause for s186 closures is unsustainable recreational pressure, resulting from ineffective regulations. While a closure can protect a defined area, the underlying problem is simply shifted elsewhere. Sustainable management of any fishery begins with the collection of basic fishery data, including effort and catch composition, yet this remains a major gap in New Zealand’s recreational sector. Ultimately, fisheries cannot be managed if we do not know what is being taken. Such data allows managers to set evidence-based limits and respond adaptively. Although implementing nationwide recreational catch reporting is challenging, there are opportunities and precedents for reporting frameworks for vulnerable species within local scale fisheries.
Ultimately, management must constrain recreational catch to sustainable levels, and to do that, we first need to know what the catch actually is. Tools such as bag limits, seasonal closures, and minimum legal sizes are important, but they are often ineffective on their own, do not cap total harvest, and can be overwhelmed by high fishing pressure. Experience shows that combining these tools, guided by reliable catch estimates, can meaningfully improve sustainability. For example, several years of monitoring showed that recreational pāua catch rates in Kaikōura were highly unsustainable following the five year earthquake related closure. In response, the fishery now operates under a reduced daily bag limit of three, an increased minimum legal size of 130 mm, and a four month open season from May to August. Best available estimates indicate that this combination successfully constrained recreational harvest to within the allocated allowance.
A short term option is to prohibit the harvest of all species without specified daily bag limits. This would support recovery in depleted areas and protect healthy populations from becoming the next targets of displaced fishing effort, though some sites may still require active restoration and mitigation of environmental stressors. At the same time, existing limits for regulated species such as pāua, mussels, and cockles need to be reconsidered nationwide to reflect population growth and the much higher fishing pressure now compared with when these limits were set in the 1980s.
These would be helpful first steps, but without a fundamental shift in how we manage recreational fishing, with long-term solutions in mind, these issues will only worsen.
In New Zealand, most people can still go to the coast and gather seafood with relatively little effort, but this privilege is unlikely to last under the current system. We are one of the few developed countries where recreational fishing operates with no licensing or reporting requirements, effectively functioning as an open access fishery. If we want to safeguard the future of recreational fishing, investment in modern management tools will be essential.
