A West Cork-based whale-watching tour business has ended its 2023 season early, blaming overfishing of sprat for the absence of the usual whale visitors to the South Coast.

In a social media post on Monday (27 November), Cork Whale Watch said: “Over the past week we carried out long searches of all the favoured areas, in idyllic spotting conditions and found the sea to be absolutely barren of any life at all, not even bird life. Nothing at all remaining in our patch of the Atlantic.

“There is a simple reason for this situation, there are no sprat shoals anywhere for whales to feed on in West Cork waters as there always was.”

The company claims that sprat “have been overfished to the point of extinction by the large Irish pelagic trawlers that target the shoals as they assemble to spawn”.

Describing the situation as “ill advised, unsustainable and destructive” and comparing it to the decimation of West Cork’s herring stocks in the 1990s, Cork Whale Watch says that overfishing of sprat “has gone on for decades now, unregulated, no quota system, no conservation measures of any kind, to the inevitable conclusion of where we are now, they are gone, not a shoal anywhere”.

Sprat is a highly lucrative fishery worth more than €3 million annually to the Irish fishing fleet. Most is sold as fishmeal to the aquaculture industry, as previously reported on Afloat.ie.

But it is also a key food source for “almost every species of fish in the north east Atlantic”, as Cork Whale Watch argues, “as well as all seabirds, whales and dolphins”.

It adds: “In this way [sprat] are the very life blood of a healthy oceanic food chain. Fishing them to extinction is all part of the dreadful abuse of the ocean carried out by human greed, and pathetic fishery management.”