KEY POINTS:
Popular eating fish such as snapper, hoki and tuna are in a Greenpeace guide aimed at persuading shoppers to avoid the most at-risk seafood species.
The Red Fish guide was launched yesterday at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World in Auckland.
It is part of an international consumer campaign which Greenpeace says has already seen supermarkets throughout Europe and the United States refusing to stock unsustainable species.
Campaign manager Carmen Gravatt said all 12 species in the guide were at high risk of having been sourced from overfished stocks and caught using destructive fishing methods.
"New Zealanders have the power to help end the peril our oceans and fisheries are in. We are asking people to demand truly sustainable seafood from their retailer and use the guide."
Greenpeace is calling for a global network of marine reserves covering 40 per cent of the oceans and for a cautious approach to managing fishing areas before the stock collapses.
Shoppers should ask retailers where and how a fish was caught and whether the shop has a policy for sourcing only truly sustainable seafood.
The guide, for example, suggests avoiding orange roughy, saying they live for 100 years, do not reproduce until they are at least 20 years old and produce few eggs compared with other species, and bottom trawling methods used to catch them destroy ancient coral forests.
It says snapper are a slow-growing and late-starting breeder and are under pressure from combined commercial and recreation catches.
Trawling for arrow squid kills threatened New Zealand sea lions and during the hoki fishing season hundreds of New Zealand fur seal and seabirds, such as albatross, are killed.
Retail shops in Auckland at the weekend were selling snapper fillets for between $36 and $45 a kilo; hoki fillets cost $12/kg.
Auckland Fish Market manager Tom Searle said it would be a shame if people were steered away from seafood, which offered health benefits.
"You can confidently walk into any fish shop in New Zealand and know that any fish caught in New Zealand that's in the shop is absolutely fine to eat, because the fishery is sustainably managed."
Mr Searle said hoki stocks were closely monitored, arrow squid was one of the most sustainable species because of its short life and high reproductive rate, and orange roughy tuna and shark species were under management under a quota system.
The market did not sell Antarctic toothfish, hake and oreo.
Mr Searle said tuna was popular with customers; it was a seasonal catch, caught by trolling.
Milan Barbarich of Anton's Seafood said New Zealand's quota management system was recognised as one of the world's best.
"But Greenpeace and Forest & Bird would have you catching nothing."
He said the snapper fishery had rejuvenated under 20 years of quota management.
Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said Greenpeace should focus elsewhere in the world where stocks had been fished out rather than in New Zealand which had one of the "few sustainable wild fisheries".
But he said the quota management system was "not perfect".
Greenpeace's 'red fish' to avoid:
Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish, arrow squid, flatfish, hake, hoki, orange roughy, oreo dories, sharks, shrimp and prawns, snapper, swordfish, tuna (except for skipjack).
