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Bycatch rates in fisheries largely driven by variation in individual vessel behaviour

Nature Sustainability (2022)Cite this article

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02 June 2022 Editor’s Note: The editors of Nature Sustainability wish to alert readers that issues related to data use and data analysis in this Article have been raised and are currently being investigated.

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Abstract

Fisheries bycatch continues to drive the decline of many threatened marine species such as seabirds, sharks, marine mammals and sea turtles. Management frameworks typically address incidental catch with fleet-level controls on fishing. Yet, individual operators differ in their fishing practices and efficiency at catching fish. If operators have differing abilities to target, they should also have differing abilities to avoid bycatch. We analysed variations in threatened species bycatch among individual operators from five industrial fisheries representing different geographic areas, gear types and target species. The individual vessel is a significant predictor of bycatch for 15 of the 16 cases, including species that represent high or low costs to fishers or have economic value as potentially targeted byproducts. Encouragingly, we found high-target and low-bycatch operators in all five sectors, including gears known for high bycatch mortality worldwide. These results show that there is untapped opportunity to reduce negative environmental impacts of fisheries with interventions targeting specific performance groups of individuals, supporting an alternative perspective towards managing global fisheries.

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Fig. 1: Vessel bycatch and target catch.
Fig. 2: Regression coefficients for individual vessels.
Fig. 3: Correlations between bycatch types.
Fig. 4: Bycatch ratios over time.

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Data availability

All the figures and tables in this manuscript have associated raw data from five confidential scientific observer datasets. Access was granted by AFMA, following the terms of a Deed of Confidentiality between AFMA and the authors. The key provisions of the Deed prohibit release of the data in any form and prohibit any outputs that identify individual vessels or any characteristics of the vessels. In line with these restrictions, the data needed to replicate the statistical analyses cannot be released, but the summarized and fully anonymized data needed to recreate the figures in the manuscript are freely available as CSV files in a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/lroberson/skippersbycatch_pub). The data needed to recreate Table 1 and Supplementary Table 2 (the results of the statistical models) cannot be released because they include fishing locations. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code needed to reproduce the figures in this manuscript is freely available as R Markdown files in a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/lroberson/skippersbycatch_pub).

Change history

  • 13 April 2022

    In the version of this article initially published, the Source data for Figs. 1,4 were incorrect, and have now been replaced in the HTML version of the article.

  • 02 June 2022

    Editor’s Note: The editors of Nature Sustainability wish to alert readers that issues related to data use and data analysis in this Article have been raised and are currently being investigated.

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Acknowledgements

We thank AFMA for providing access to the observer data and permission to use their illustrations in Supplementary Fig. 4. We thank M. Miller, S. Cooper and M. Fuller from the CSIRO for their assistance with cleaning and preparing these datasets. We also thank A. Lawrence, R. Gunn, S. Boag and several fisheries managers from AFMA for sharing their experience with Commonwealth fisheries that provided important context for the interpretation of our results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Leslie A. Roberson & Chris Wilcox

  2. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Leslie A. Roberson

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  1. Leslie A. Roberson
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Contributions

C.W. conceived the original idea for the study and L.A.R. further developed the concept to its current state. L.A.R. performed the analysis and interpreted the results, with C.W.’s input on both components. L.A.R. wrote the manuscript with editorial contributions from C.W.

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Correspondence to Leslie A. Roberson.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Erin Seney, Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–4 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Supplementary Data 1

Statistical data for Supplementary Fig. 1.

Supplementary Data 2

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Roberson, L.A., Wilcox, C. Bycatch rates in fisheries largely driven by variation in individual vessel behaviour. Nat Sustain (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00865-0

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