Pipi or Goolwa cockle in South Australia recover after quotas and curb on catches; former bait becomes food delicacy
Cocklers from the Lakes and Coorong Pipi Fishery shuffling on the Coorong beaches in the early morning to collect the pipi.
Main image courtesy Marine Stewardship Council
South Australia’s pipi or Goolwa cockle returned to sustainable levels, with quotas and restrictions applied by the state government, after being depleted in the mid to late 2000s.
The pipi – a small clam-like bivalve (shellfish) – was harvested on the beaches of the Coorong region near the River Murray mouth by Ngarrindjeri people for the past 10 000 years of their 16,000 years in the region.
In early days of South Australia’s European settlement, local residents would take a horse-drawn train to Goolwa to collect cockles to be used for bait – a day’s outing later commemorated by the SteamRanger heritage cockle train. Cocklers would gather at the water's edge along Goolwa Beach to do the “cockle shuffle” with their feet to bring the small molluscs to the surface ready to be collected.
Graduating from fishing bait to a delicacy, the sweet and juicy pipis belatedly gained demand from restaurants in South Australia and the eastern seaboard in the 21st Century. Demand led to overfishing of the pipi. The turnaround in pipi stocks came with quotas on the commercial Lakes and Coorong Pipi Fishery, operating inside the Coorong, and the Marine Scalefish Fishery on the ocean beaches of Younghusband Peninsula, next to the Coorong.
The Lakes and Coorong Pipi Fishery was certified by the Marine Stewardship Council in 2008, making it subject to annual surveillance audits. The community-based fishery became an impressive example of the benefits of sustainable output combined with innovative marketing that made South Australian pipi a sought-after product. Partnering with South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), it was the second fishery (after sardines) in South Australia to achieve the council’s certification.
With the quotas, a minimum legal catch length of 35mm was put in place to allow spawning to occur at least once and the season is limited to November 1 until May 31, with daily bag limits for recreation fishers at 900 per vehicle and 300 per person.
The quota system, controversial when introduced, saw pipi stocks bounce back to near record levels. Pipi farmers who started collecting them for bait, selling at up to a dollar a kilogram, saw the price soar to up to $10 when they started to become a human food favourite.
One of the challenges of pipis for commercial producers selling to the human food market has been having to be purged in seawater overnight to get the grit out of the molluscs. Goolwa PipiCo that brought former fishing competitors under the one brand that enabled a combined effort to overcome such challenges. It started packaging fresh pipis in bags that modifed the atmosphere around the shellfish and doubled their shelf life.
