By recognising and exploring differences in people’s worldviews, fisheries, geographies, and species behaviour, we can enhance how we estimate and address the bycatch of Endangered, Threatened, and Protected Species – as a workshop we ran earlier this year demonstrates.
Led by David Lusseau (DTU Aqua) and held at the Hague, the Netherlands on 5 July 2024, CIBBRiNA brought together 11 participants at its WP6-CS7 workshop on bycatch assessment. In a stepwise process, the workshop explored:
- Participants’ different worldviews and the influence of these on bycatch assessments.
- Challenges in estimating rates of bycatch and how to overcome these to produce more accurate and precise total bycatch estimates.
- The vital importance of context in applying mitigation strategies capable of working in real-life.
How worldviews affect bycatch assessment
Workshop participants included policymakers, scientists, NGOs, and representatives from the fishing industry. We might expect people from different backgrounds, regardless of their jobs, to have different worldviews – and that’s exactly what we found when we started the workshop with a short survey.
The survey drew on a framework from Pascual et al. (2023) to present four archetypal worldviews:
- Living from nature – emphasizing ecosystem services.
- Living with nature – acknowledging intrinsic values.
- Living in nature – prioritizing care and stewardship.
- Living as nature – fostering a kinship with all life forms.
For example, someone whose worldview is based on #4 above might that feel any bycatch is too much bycatch, regardless of the consequences of the mitigations necessary to eliminate it completely; while someone with a worldview instead based on #1 might feel that although it is important to minimise bycatch, mitigation measures must enable ecosystem services like food provision to continue. Ultimately, navigating the complexities of bycatch management requires us to be fully aware of the diverse worldviews that shape people’s perspectives and thus their motivations and the actions they take in the world.
Acknowledging and addressing challenges in estimating total bycatch
The central theme of the workshop was the challenge of accurately and precisely determining total bycatch (for different ETP species or populations of these). Regardless of worldviews, this is crucial to make robust informed decisions about bycatch management.
There is no single and perfect method for overcoming this, because all human and computational approaches have limitations. Workshop participants discussed these limitations, and ways to mitigate them and achieve greater accuracy and precision when combining bycatch estimates with data on fishing effort – as the graphic below explores.
Evaluating and mitigating bycatch
The ultimate question posed during the workshop was: How much bycatch is too much bycatch?
Participants ended the day by discussing a range of tools for mitigation and the need for context-sensitive approaches:
- Mitigation strategies: Techniques like pingers and area closures can be effective but must be adapted to species-specific behaviors and ecological contexts.
- Behavioral factors: The efficacy of risk-based mitigation measures often depends on the interaction between an animal’s internal state (e.g. hunger) and external stimuli (e.g. the sound of a fishing boat’s engine). Current gaps in data from observations of animal behaviour hinder a deeper understanding of these dynamics.
Embracing the complexity of bycatch
The CIBBRiNA WP6-CS7 workshop once more demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary collaboration in addressing bycatch. By integrating diverse worldviews, advancing sampling methodologies, and exploring innovative mitigation strategies, the workshop laid the groundwork for more effective bycatch assessments.
Moving forward, we must continue to refine these methods, conduct further research into behavioral interactions of ETP species with fishing operations, and foster partnerships across sectors to balance conservation goals with sustainable industry practices. As emphasised throughout the workshop, the key lies in embracing the complexity of bycatch while striving for practical, evidence-based solutions.