Hawaiʻi anglers have a chance to win prizes worth up to $250 for catching invasive fish.
Organizers of the 2024 Hawaii Invasive Species Roundup will award prizes worth $5,000 in total for various sizes of roi (peacock grouper), ta’ape (bluestripe snapper), toʻau (blacktail snapper), and tilapia.
The contest starts Aug. 1 and will run through mid-September, just before the annual American Fisheries Society conference being held in Honolulu this year. The society is one of the oldest fisheries science organizations in the world.
Anglers and spearfishers will compete virtually using a phone app to photograph their catch. A Canada-based company called Angler's Atlas is hosting the contest on its phone app MyCatch.
"What I wanted to do is demonstrate the value that anglers can play in fisheries science," said Sean Simmons, the president and founder of the company. "It's often thought of as, oh, you can't trust anglers, they don't know what they're doing. Well, actually, turns out you can trust the data, and they often do know what they're doing, and so let's find a way to illustrate and demonstrate this."
Simmons reached out to the local chapter of the American Fisheries Society and learned about community events to round up invasive fish.
"So we thought, well, wouldn't that be perfect, do an event leading up to the conference? All that data comes in in real-time, and at the conference, basically, we'll present the results so we can show exactly, you know, what are the invasive species, where are they distributed across the islands, and also award prizes and ideally involve the anglers at the conference as well," he told HPR.
He said over 200 people have signed up for the free contest so far. There are separate prizes for the adult and keiki categories.
To sign up for the contest and learn more, click here or use the app MyCatch.
This interview aired on The Conversation on July 30, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
