For the Black Marlin project, postgraduate student Sam Williams and Dr. Julian Pepperell (University of Queensland Adjunct Scientist) travelled to the 5th International Billfish Symposium in Taiwan. The symposium was hosted by the University of Taipei and featured many exciting outcomes for both billfish research and fisheries science.
Sam presented a poster on his project to investigate the population structure of black marlin within Australian waters, and Julian gave a key note talk entitled “Forty Years of Conventional Billfish Tagging: Successes, Failures and Lessons”.
After the conference, Sam and Julian travelled to the fishing village of Chenggong, which hosts an annual billfish festival. They were hosted by researchers at Taiwan Eastern Marine Biology Research Center. Sam was able to make the most of this opportunity by collecting black marlin tissue samples that will be valuable in future research into population structure of the species worldwide.
