i don't know what the rules are up there but its illegal for us to even have any fishing tackle on board let alone keep any scale fish on board even if it is just a single fillet of fish you got from the shop. (massive fines + potential loss of licence) our fisheries are VERY strictly moderated.
we occasionally have the fisheries board us while we are trawling to make sure of this.
bycatch is a problem in any fishing industry but with prawn fishing it really depends where you are and how you set your gear, in the photos i posted you can see that we were catching almost pure prawns with the odd leatherjacket etc also you can see our hopper setup which is designed to keep most of the bycatch alive and it works extremely well especially when compared to just dumping everything onto an old style sorting table.
every person i have taken out has been amazed at how low the bycatch rate is, i think the expectation is to see us out there tearing up the bottom, im not trying to make it sound good for those that might be concerned but in this case i guess a picture says a thousand words.
also in our fishery we do surveys before we fish every run to see where the prawns are/their size/see if they are spawning/the catch rate per minute/the bycatch ratio/the species of bycatch
you can get more information here:
http://www.sardi.sa.gov.au/dhtml/ss/...D=268&tempID=1