NZ rock lobster industry commentator Daryl Sykes highlights some of the most remote fisheries on the globe.
Spiny rock lobster fisheries in remote locations are often easy to overlook on the global production charts usually dominated by Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Cuba and the Caribbean. However in isolated archipelagos and around sparsely populated coasts, lobster fishing is not just a premium seafood activity; it is often the industry that anchors local employment, freight links, processing, and public revenue.
What makes these remote fisheries distinctive is the combination of distance, exposure, and dependence.
Vessels work around rough weather, narrow seasonal windows, limited port infrastructure, and high freight costs, while communities rely on lobster income to support social services and maintain a viable local economy.
Remote settings
The clearest modern example is Tristan da Cunha, widely described as the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago. It has no airport, access is by sea, and the inshore rock lobster fishery is the main commercial lifeline for a resident population of roughly 245 people. The Jasus tristani fishery accounts for more than three-quarters of the island’s economic activity and about 80% of island revenue, which makes stock health and fishing opportunity central to the territory’s economic resilience.
Saint Paul and Amsterdam, in the southern Indian Ocean, are remote in a different way: they are not community fisheries in the same sense as Tristan, but they are logistically extreme industrial outposts. The Jasus paulensis lobster season runs from 1 December to 30 April, with trips staged from Réunion Island by a mothership that deploys smaller craft to work coastal and deep grounds around the islands.
Scale and productivity
Around Tristan da Cunha, annual landings are about 400 tonnes and catches are managed under TACs first introduced in 1991 after earlier overfishing and subsequent stock rebuilding efforts. The limited number of fishing days each season means that weather can influence annual production almost as much as stock size, a common feature of oceanic lobster fisheries.
The Saint Paul and Amsterdam fishery is larger and more explicitly structured by science-led quotas. For 2022–23, the total TAC was 420 tonnes, commercial landings reached 415.48 tonnes, and the stock assessments concluded that biomass at both islands was above target levels consistent with maximum sustainable yield. Average CPUE in recent seasons has remained well above the fishery’s target reference levels at both Amsterdam and Saint Paul, indicating a productive and currently healthy stock base under present controls.
Fishing methods and gear
Gear tends to reflect two realities of remote lobster fisheries: the need to fish selectively, and the need to handle rough coasts with limited shore infrastructure. Pot and trap fisheries dominate because they are efficient, species-targeted, and comparatively compatible with live release of undersize animals.
At Tristan da Cunha, fishers use box traps, larger “monster” traps, and hoop nets from a local fleet of 12 powerboats. Each licensed boat works a defined number of traps and hoop nets, and the catch is landed to the island factory for processing and export, mainly via South Africa. This is a compact island system in which harvesting, handling, and processing are closely integrated.
At Saint Paul and Amsterdam, the gear is split between a shallow coastal fishery and a deeper offshore fishery. Wooden pots are used in the coastal kelp zone to about 70 m, while steel pots are used in deeper water from about 70 m to 350 m, with a larger vessel acting as mothership for smaller “canots” and “caseyeurs”. That arrangement is typical of truly remote grounds: it spreads risk, extends range, and allows operators to work several habitats without needing a permanent shore base.
The rock lobster species Jasus frontalis, occurs only around the Juan Fernández and Desventuradas Islands about 400 miles (≈640 km) west of mainland Chile, with fewer than 1,000 residents on two islands and a local economy that depends heavily—roughly 70% by some estimates—on lobster income. The fishery is artisanal but highly organised. Only licensed island residents may fish and licences are limited. In the early 2010s there were about 57 active boats and roughly 150 fishing families, a number that has stayed in the range of 40–50 boats over many decades. Commercial exploitation dates back to the 1890s, and islanders themselves pressed Chilean authorities as early as 1894 to create formal rules, including extraction limits and seasonal closures.
The broader lobster literature shows that remote fisheries have often evolved from hand collection or simple traps into highly structured pot fisheries. Once refrigeration, freezing, and long-distance transport improved, lobster shifted from subsistence and local trade into export production, and gear modernised accordingly. In many places, that history also explains why management now emphasises size limits, TACs, seasonal windows, and restrictions on gear numbers or soak times.
Economic contribution
The strongest case for the importance of remote lobster fisheries is economic concentration. On Tristan da Cunha, lobster underwrites most of the territory’s cash economy, helps sustain the island processing plant, and effectively supports the outward export connection on which the community depends. That means the value of the fishery is larger than its landed tonnage alone; it also sustains jobs, logistics, local government income, and the confidence needed for people to remain on the island.
Even where no resident community is based directly on the fishing ground, remote lobster fisheries still have substantial national value. The Saint Paul and Amsterdam fishery supports vessel operations, processing, monitoring, science, and quota-based management within the French Southern and Antarctic Territories system. Those features make it a high-value fishery whose economic contribution is amplified by product quality, export orientation, and strong compliance systems.
Saint Paul/Amsterdam management is strongly expert driven, built around quantitative models, formal harvest control rules (HCRs), and centralised administration, with industry stakeholders consulted but not embedded as a resident community.
Juan Fernández management has been shaped by fishers themselves for over a century, with formal regulations emerging from local initiatives and now informed by scientific studies.
The wider history of lobster use reinforces the same lesson. Lobsters have repeatedly become a premium trading commodity because they combine high unit value with strong market demand, making them especially suitable for peripheral places that cannot easily compete in bulk commodities. For remote regions, a relatively modest volume of lobster can therefore generate a disproportionately large economic return.
Remote lobster fisheries are best understood as strategic fisheries rather than merely niche ones. Their future depends on keeping a difficult balance between productivity, logistics, and conservation: stocks must stay strong, gear must remain selective, and management must absorb weather shocks, freight constraints, and environmental change.
That is why these fisheries attract such close attention from industry and managers. In remote settings, lobster is rarely “just another species”; it is often the backbone of a local economy or a flagship export fishery, and when it is managed well, it proves that small, isolated fisheries can deliver both commercial value and long-term resilience.
