Sustaining Marine Fisheries by National Research Council

Author:National Research Council
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Agriculture : Aquaculture and Fisheries
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 1999-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

Reducing Bycatch and Discards

Reducing bycatch and discards is clearly a high priority for management and has been made a specific goal in recent national policies and international agreements. The matter has been addressed recently by the U.S. Congress in the revised Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (see pp 78–80). The National Marine Fisheries Service has drafted a national bycatch plan (NMFS 1998). These and other efforts appear to have produced results.

Data for the years 1994 and 1995 suggest that bycatch and discard rates have declined since the mid-1980s as a result of several factors (FAO 1997d, Natural Resources Consultants 1998), including a decline in fishing effort for some important species, time and area closures, adoption of more selective fishing technologies, enforcement of prohibitions of discarding by some countries, and more progressive attitudes among fishery managers, users, and society at large with respect to problems resulting from discards. In addition, discards (but not bycatch) have been reduced by new technologies for using a variety of marine species and a greater use of many species for human consumption and for feed for aquaculture and livestock. All these efforts have reduced discards by several million metric tons since 1990 (FAO 1997d, National Resources Consultants 1998), and they have reduced bycatch as well.

Perhaps the most important overall approach is to stop treating bycatch as if it were a side effect of directed fishing. Instead, as proposed by Davis (1996), for example, the existence of bycatch should be recognized and dealth with in fishery-management plans as part of an overall exploitation of the marine community. Thus, catch quotas would be established for various gear types that reflect the mix of species those gears typically catch. Total fish removals would be accounted for if the catch quotas were based on the assessment of the species mix as a whole. Obviously, the size of the catch quota should be based as much as possible on information on interactions among the species involved (i.e., an ecosystem consideration). Under Davis’s proposal, there would be no target catch or bycatch for each species; instead, there would be a total catch for groups of species. In Alaska, bycatch of halibut and groundfish is considered in setting and monitoring annual quotas, and the fisheries are closed when annual catch or bycatch quotas for individual species are reached (Pennoyer 1997).

Related to the multispecies approach to bycatch is the idea of individual bycatch quotas as opposed to fleetwide quotas or total catch quotas of bycatch (Alverson et al. 1994). The idea is that each individual fisher would be given an incentive to reduce unwanted bycatch, instead of everyone racing to catch their quota of target species before others in the fishery. This can happen even with individual quotas for the target species, because fishers want to avoid the restrictions imposed by bycatch limits on those who have not yet taken their quota of target species. One result of this is that the quota for the target species is not reached before the bycatch quota stops the fishery.

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