Use of a counterfactual approach to evaluate the effect of area closures on fishing location in a tropical tuna fishery

Modelling the Spatial Behaviour of a Tropical Tuna Purse Seine Fleet

Industrial tuna fisheries operate in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but concerns over sustainability and environmental impacts of these fisheries have resulted in increased scrutiny of how they are managed. An important but often overlooked factor in the success or failure of tuna fisheries management is the behaviour of fishers and fishing fleets. Uncertainty in how a fishing fleet w...

Biodiversity Offsets: A Cost-Effective Interim Solution to Seabird Bycatch in Fisheries?

The concept of biodiversity offsets is well established as an approach to environmental management. The concept has been suggested for environmental management in fisheries, particularly in relation to the substantial numbers of non-target species--seabirds in particular--caught and killed as incidental bycatch during fishing activities. Substantial areas of fisheries are being closed to protec...

Trade-offs in the design of fishery closures: management of silky shark bycatch in the eastern Pacific Ocean tuna fishery.

Bycatch--the incidental catch of nontarget species--is a principal concern in marine conservation and fisheries management. In the eastern Pacific Ocean tuna fishery, a large fraction of nonmammal bycatch is captured by purse-seine gear when nets are deployed around floating objects. We examined the spatial distribution of a dominant species in this fishery's bycatch, the apex predator silky sh...

The Potential Use of Time-area Closures to Reduce Catches of Bigeye Tuna (thunnus Obesus) in the Purse-seine Fishery of the Eastern Pacific Ocean

Different residence times of yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacares, and bigeye tuna, T. obesus, found in mixed aggregations over a seamount

Aggregations of tuna can be found in association with seamounts throughout all the tropical oceans and these aggregations are often exploited by tuna fishing fleets (Fonteneau, 1991). In Hawaii, a fishery has developed over the last decade that targets the mixed species aggregations of predominantly subadult tuna found in association with the Cross Seamount located approximately 160 nmi south o...