Poachers are "beating the system" through a loophole in the country's fisheries regulations which one fisheries official said is allowing them to harvest undersized catches.

Gilford Lloyd, senior officer in charge of enforcement at the Department of Fisheries, said he has reports that Dominican poachers, and even some local fishermen, are harvesting juvenile conchs out of their shells while they are underwater. He added that poachers are discarding the shells on the seabed, a practice that discourages other conchs from inhabiting the area. Lloyd said conch divers would normally bring their catches above water to remove them from their shells. This makes it easier to determine if the conch meets the legal requirements for harvest, he said.

The current law dictates that only conchs with a prominent, flared lip can be removed from The Bahamas' territorial waters. "The poachers have a new practice where they dive with a compressor and knock conch out of their shells underwater and drop shells on the seabed," Lloyd said. "Bahamian fishermen believe that if you drop the shell on the seabed that the live conch will not come back into that area. Live conchs tend to stay away from areas where you have a lot of dead conch." Lloyd said fisheries laws need to be updated to address the new trend.

"The problem is that our laws say you must have a well formed lip. The weakness in that system is the fishermen circumvent that by knocking baby conchs out under the sea," he said. "So when I come to market I see conch meat, not the shell.. They are beating the system by using that method. I do know that they are getting the baby conch, poachers are doing it, and Bahamians are doing it. So the conch laws need to address that; the part which says it needs to have a well formed lip, [the law] needs to go a little further than that."

Poachers have become an alarming threat to the fishing communities of Spanish Wells and Long Island, as well as some other areas of The Bahamas. Lloyd said the juvenile catches he has witnessed on Dominican poaching vessels over the last few months are alarming. "What I now observe on those boats is that they [poachers] are catching the tiniest of our fish and lobsters. What our fishermen would release, they catch. They are doing tremendous damage to our resources and getting quite a bit of lobsters and baby conch -- it's frightening," Lloyd said.

Earlier this month, President of the Bahamas Commercial Fisheries Alliance Adrian Laroda told Guardian Business that millions of dollars in potential revenue leave the country because of poaching. "This is evident when you average the number of vessels that are poaching here and the amount of product they carry out of the country once their trips are over," Laroda said. Recently, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham said his administration is working on a five-year plan to equip the Royal Bahamas Defence Force to better protect Bahamian waters from poachers.

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