The health of our waterways is something that benefits us all – the better nick of the water, the more fish there’s for us to catch.
An organization that is doing something about water quality is OzFish Unlimited, a national fishing conservation charity established to improve the health of our rivers, lakes and estuaries.
A member-based organisation dedicated to making our fishing grounds healthy, vibrant and more productive. Their active work includes; habitat restoration such as resnagging, riverbank planting, clean-ups, fishways, shellfish reefs and educational and community capacity building programs.
Since European settlement, a staggering 95 per cent of shellfish reefs have been lost in the Passage… and Ben Diggles, a marine ecologist has been on a mission to turn that around.
Ben and his team created artificial reefs made from Besa blocks and used oyster shells, collected from Brisbane restaurants. 18 months later, Queensland’s first shellfish restoration project is a great success.
“My American colleagues have been doing this for over 30 years, and they told me that their results. I was sceptical, but the proof is in the pudding. Our results are showing the (universities independently verified) 16 times more fish in this area than before we started, so that’s just incredible. That’s a large number of fish.”
