The impact of scallop dredging on benthic megafauna was assessed by direct observation of damage, both in the bycatch and in organisms encountering dredges but not captured. Damage was assessed using a simple 4point scale adapted for different taxonomic groups. Experimental dredging was undertaken on a scallop fishing ground in the north Irish Sea, off the Isle of Man. Divers were deployed imme...

Fisheries bycatch of marine animals has been linked to population declines of multiple species, including many sea turtles. Altering the visual cues associated with fishing gear may reduce sea turtle bycatch. We examined the effectiveness of illuminating gillnets with ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes for reducing green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) interactions. We found that the mean sea t...

and customary fishers mainly take white sharks as bycatch in gillnets, and occasionally on longlines (Duffy unpubl. data). Sport fisheries for white sharks in New Zealand are largely undeveloped and fishers often tag and release those they do catch (Mossman 1993; Wilson 2002). A protective beach meshing programme run by Dunedin City Council (DCC) operates seasonally off Brighton, St. Clair and ...

Bycatch in longline fisheries threatens the viability of some seabird populations. The Hawaii longline swordfish fishery reduced seabird captures by an order of magnitude primarily through mitigating bycatch during setting. Now, 75% of captures occur during hauling. We fit observer data to a generalized additive regression model with mixed effects to determine the significance of the effect of ...

The impacts of climate change on marine species are often compounded by other stressors that make direct attribution and prediction difficult. Shy albatrosses (Thalassarche cauta) breeding on Albatross Island, Tasmania, show an unusually restricted foraging range, allowing easier discrimination between the influence of non-climate stressors (fisheries bycatch) and environmental variation. Local...

The current harvest policy for the Pacific halibut fishery uses a 32-inch minimum size limit in the directed commercial fishery, and total annual catches in each of the eight regulatory areas are based on area-specific exploitation rate targets. In nondirected fisheries retention of halibut is prohibited. Post-release survival rates are gear dependent and partially based on observer accounts of...

To improve the effectiveness of tori-lines it is necessary to evaluate the ability of tori-lines to mitigate seabird bycatch and determine what kind of seabird species gather during line settings, attack the bait and are incidentally caught. We conducted two experiments in the western North Pacific and examined the effectiveness for seabird mitigation of light streamer tori-lines which have no ...

S Pelagic deep longline was widely used in targeting tunas of high economic values with other fish species caught incidentally as bycatch. Identifying characteristics of vertical distribution of fish species that interact with longline can provide critical information needed for the development of effective measures to mitigate bycatch species and is essential for ecosystem conservation. Much w...

  This study aimed to design a bycatch reduction device (BRD) for shrimp beam trawl, which is manufactured by flexible materials to reduce bycatch for the gear in the South Sea of Korea. The model test was carried out to understand the shape of the gear in the water and to measure the variation of flow speed due to the BRD in a circulating water channel. Catches were compared between a shrimp b...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org G fisheries provide approximately 16% of all protein consumed by humans, employ about 200 million people, and are valued at US$82 billion (Botsford et al. 1997; FAO Fisheries Department 2004). Eight percent, or 7.2 million tons, of the global catch is comprised of non-target species and discarded, and this mortality is having major ...