An interview-based approach to assess marine mammal and sea turtle captures in artisanal fisheries

Recent case studies have highlighted high bycatchmortality of sea turtlesand marine mammalsin artisanal fisheries, but in most countries there are few data on artisanal fishingeffort, catch, or bycatch. With artisanal fisheriescomprising >95% of the world’s fishermen, this knowledge gap presents a major challenge to threatened speciesconservation and sustainable fisheriesinitiatives. We report on results from an intensive pilot study to evaluate whether interview surveys can be effective in assessing fishing effort and threatened species bycatch. Fisheriesand bycatchdata from interviews with >6100 fishermen in seven developing countries were collected in <1 year for approximately USD $47,000, indicating that this approach may rapidly yield coarse-level information over large areas at low cost. This effort provided the first fisheriescharacterizations for many areas and revealed the widespread nature of high bycatchin artisanal fisheries. Challenges to study design and implementation prevented quantitative estimation or spatial comparisons of bycatchduring this pilot research phase, but results suggested that annual sea turtle bycatchmay number at least in the low thousands of individuals per country. Annual odontocete bycatchmay number at least in the low hundreds per country. Sirenian bycatchoccurred in all study areas but was frequent only in West Africa. We discuss lessons learned from this survey effort and present a revised protocol for future interview-based bycatchassessments.