A Mitigation Hierarchy Approach for Managing Sea Turtle Captures in Small-Scale Fisheries

Evaluating elicited judgments of turtle captures for data‐limited fisheries management

“…A winter survey in San Jose in 2017 (July–September estimated that 15 inshore‐midwater vessels actively fished, primarily with gillnets, while three additional vessels used gillnets but primarily fished with another gear type. Another small‐scale gillnet fleet comprised of small, open‐welled vessels known as “chalana,” with a capacity range of 1–8 GT, also operates from San Jose in the inshore fishing area (Arlidge et al, ). All respondents in the current study were part of a wider elicitation survey investigating the efficacy of turtle capture and bycatch reduction strategies in the San Jose fishing system.…”

“…We separately assessed two seasonal categorizations due to the differences in fishing effort between winter and summer conditions in the Lambayeque coastal fisheries. Summer is usually considered to be December–February (3 months), but information provided by a government fisheries scientist in San Jose during a key informant interview noted that summer‐like conditions span December–May (Arlidge et al, ), with this longer seasonal division supported by capture reports from the Lambayeque region (Guevara‐Carrasco & Bertrand, ). Here we classify the San Jose winter fishing season as June–November and the summer fishing season as December–May.…”

Mitigation of Elasmobranch Bycatch in Trawlers: A Case Study in Indian Fisheries

“…However, incentives in the form of eco-labeling schemes or compensation for lost catch can effectively produce behavioral change in fishers (Gjertsen et al, 2010). For instance, an incentive scheme to give premium prices to fishers abiding by bycatch regulations is currently under trial in a small-scale fishery in Peru (Arlidge et al, 2020). Such mechanisms could be explored to encourage uptake of mitigation measures and compensate for lost profits, once motivations and constraints of fishers are better understood (Booth et al, 2019a).…”

“…Although the mitigation hierarchy has been discussed conceptually for marine bycatch management (Milner-Gulland et al, 2018;, it has only previously been applied to one case study (Arlidge et al, 2020), which investigated marine turtle bycatch in a coastal gillnet fishery in Peru. While still considered a data-limited fishery compared to large-scale industrialized fisheries, there was richer bycatch data available than the current Malvan case study.…”

Community Engagement: An Integral Component of a Multifaceted Conservation Approach for the Transboundary Western Pacific Leatherback

“…Within the BIMH framework, the at-sea conservation strategies for leatherbacks in the North Pacific include technology standards, time-area closures (e.g., in California/Oregon drift gillnet fishery), gear and effort restrictions such as hard caps on bycatch (e.g., the Hawaii-based longline fishery), and best practices that together comprise a strategy designed to reduce bycatch and decrease mortality of turtles. However, atsea measures are challenging to implement across the entire migration range and do not address the large cumulative impact of artisanal fisheries in many developing countries that impact leatherbacks on their migratory routes and in coastal foraging areas on both sides of the Pacific (Arlidge et al, 2020). Given that preventing turtle bycatch completely is both challenging and costly, residual negative impacts on turtle populations continue to take place.…”