Evaluation of changes in the Kuwaiti prawn fishery after the 1991 Gulf War

The northern Arabian Gulf experienced one of the world's worst man-made environmental disasters during the 1991 Gulf War. The marine ecosystem and fisheries resources in Kuwait's coastal waters were severely damaged. More than 10 years have since passed. Limited work has been done in quantitative evaluation of changes in the Kuwaiti fishery before and after the Gulf War. In this study, using the Iranian prawn fishery as a reference, we identified a significant reduction of landings in the Kuwaiti prawn fishery after the Gulf War. We developed a model to estimate annual prawn recruitment from pre-season survey data and found that the post-war recruitments were significantly lower than those before the war. A regression of finfish landings against prawn catches in Kuwaiti waters revealed a great increase in finfish landings after the war. This study suggests that there has been large reduction in recruitment in Kuwait's prawn fishery since the Gulf War, which may have contributed to decreased prawn landings. We hypothesize that the lower prawn recruitment and landings after the war may be a consequence of changes in the ecosystem of the Kuwaiti waters, as a result of the Gulf War. However, because of insufficient data on the ecosystem and fisheries, this hypothesis cannot be tested in this study. We recommend this hypothesis be tested in future studies.