Our Recreational fishing guide 2016 includes new rules for lobster and for pink snapper in Shark Bay.

The 700 mm pink snapper maximum size limit has been removed and fishers are no longer required to land pink snapper whole in these inner gulfs.

To ensure the Freycinet Estuary stock remains sustainable, the pink snapper tag lottery system has been removed and there is now a Freycinet Estuary Management Zone, where there is a new possession limit of 5 kg, or one day's bag limit of whole fish.

For rock lobster fishers, there is no longer a maximum legal size limit for taking female western rock lobsters, and two licensed fishers can now share a lobster pot. More.

Recreational fishers are celebrating the installation of the Peel region’s first purpose-built artificial reef.

Following the success of artificial reefs in Bunbury and Dunsborough, the new $1.1 million reef is located nine km offshore, due west of Halls Head, in 25 metres of water.

The reef is designed to increase biodiversity and recreational fishing opportunities for popular species such as pink snapper, Samson fish and skipjack trevally (skippy). More.

Although both adult and juvenile West Australian dhufish have a dark stripe across the eye, only the juvenile has stripes along its body.

If you catch a dhufish, it’s not legal to keep unless it has reached the minimum legal size of 500 mm, so it’s important to identify a juvenile correctly.

Like many demersal fish, dhufish don’t travel far from home and are relatively slow-growing and long-lived, so it’s important to follow the fishing rules to help keep stocks sustainable. More.

The similarity in appearance of some Pilbara/Kimberley fish species makes them difficult to identify and can potentially cause issues in keeping to the fishing rules. 

For example, spangled emperor, grass emperor and bluespotted emperor all have a similar shape and blue bars, lines and spots, making it hard to tell them apart.

Some have the same minimum size limits but not all, so it’s important to accurately identify the species caught – see our Recreational fishing identification guide for further information. More.

A seven-year monitoring program has recorded nearly 180,000 shark detections by receivers from Ningaloo to Esperance, building a picture of white shark activity in WA waters.

More than 22,000 of those detections were from 64 tagged white sharks.

The most frequent detections along the Perth coast were at the northern end of Garden Island and across Gage Roads, while greater numbers of sharks were detected off Perth during spring and early summer. More.