The research, starting in the coming days, will be carried out by the Istituto di Ricerche delle Risorse Marine e l’Ambiente (IRMA) based in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, and the Malta Centre for Fisheries Sciences (MCFS). The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is financing the project.

The Italian team is led by Dr Salvatore Mazzola who explained that results from the surveys could help predict future fish populations of the species surveyed. The study is an interdisciplinary research and will involve findings from biological and

geological data collection as well as observations by physicists.

The geological observations will help understand what the situation might have been in the past, which will then be cross-checked with data from other fields in order to give a wider picture of the behaviour of particular fish colonies in the area. The results, to be published within a year or so, will be linked to similar studies carried out by the Italian team on the Italian coast over the years.

Answering questions by The Malta Independent, Dr Mazzola said that with the knowledge of future fish populations, fishing can be regulated in an efficient way, in the long term preventing fish-stock depletion that can have far reaching environmental risks.

MCFS head Matthew Camilleri, will be leading the Maltese team. Speaking to this newspaper, he said that sound fisheries management is based on scientific monitoring of fisheries resources. The equipment provided by the Italian institute is indispensable for this kind of research, which is why the Maltese institute had embarked on this cooperation some five years ago.

Agriculture and Fisheries Parliamentary Secretary Francis Agius thanked the IRMA for their assistance in conducting the surveys. “Fish have no boundaries,” he said, “which makes cooperation on these issues indispensable.”

Dr Agius explained that the MCFS had established itself, nationally and internationally, as an advisory body and research centre in the fields of capture and culture fisheries, while serving the Fisheries Conservation and Control Division (FCCD) within the Ministry for Rural Affairs and the Environment (MRAE) by giving scientific and management advice on the exploitation of living marine resources.

He explained that Malta has recently prepared its National Annual Programme (NAP) for the collection of fisheries data for 2005 in accordance with European Commission regulations.

Besides surveys at sea, the MCFS has already established other data collection schemes fulfilling Malta’s EU obligations, but it will be expanding its scientific and technical staff over the next few months to meet the other commitments included in Malta’s NAP.