Is it good or bad to fish with FADs? What are the real impacts of the use of drifting FADs on pelagic marine ecosystems?
By L. Dagorn, K. Holland, V. Restrepo, G. Moreno. 2013
281 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The use of fish aggregating devices (FADs) by purse seine fisheries has come under increasing criticism for its potential deleterious impacts on tuna stocks, for high levels of by-catch and threats to the biodiversity of tropical pelagic ecosystems. Here, we review the current state of scientific knowledge of this fishing technique and current management strategies. Our intent is to encourage objective discussion of the topic and highlight areas worthy of future research. We show that catching juvenile tuna around FADs does not necessarily result in overfishing of stocks, although more selective fishing techniques would likely help obtain higher yield. Levels of non-tuna by-catch are comparable to or less than in other commercial tuna fisheries and are primarily comprised of species that are not considered threatened. Accordingly, to minimize impacts on ecosystem balance, there is merit in considering that all species captured in purse seine fisheries (excluding vulnerable species such as turtles and sharks) should be retained, but the consequences of such a measure should be carefully examined before implementation. The take of vulnerable species could be further reduced by introduction of additional mitigation measures, but their potential benefits would be limited without parallel efforts with other gears. Finally, there is no unequivocal empirical evidence that FADs represent an ‘ecological trap’ that inherently disrupts tuna biology although further research should focus on this issue. We encourage RFMOs to expand and improve their FAD management plans. Under appropriate management regimes, FAD fishing could be an ecologically and economically sensible fishing method.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5df20a84efbcfcb26d54d48bcdeec6150a8ea92a
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Citations in the corpus
- Spatial management of Indian Ocean tropical tuna fisheries: potential and perspectives (2014, background): “Furthermore, FAD-associated tuna have been observed to have lower growth rates than free-swimming school individuals (Hallier and Gaertner, 2008), althoughthese resultsand the presumed causal link are controversial (Soria et al., 2009; Jaquemet et al., 2011; Dagorn et al., 2012).”
- Attraction and repulsion of mobile wild organisms to finfish and shellfish aquaculture: a review (2018, background): “Many studies (see reviews in Rountree 1989, Nelson 2003, Dagorn et al. 2013) have found that physical structures in the water column tend to aggregate fishes around them and many others have shown the importance of fish cage aquaculture structures as FADs (see reviews in Johannes 2006, but also…”
- Looking behind the curtain: quantifying massive shark mortality in fish aggregating devices (2013, methodology): “To contextualize our results in relation to the observed bycatch mortality of silky sharks from the tuna purse-seine fishery in the Indian Ocean, we used data reported in Dagorn et al. (2012) on the amount of silky sharks (tons) caught per 1000 tons of tuna (WebTable 4).”
- Post-release survival of juvenile silky sharks captured in a tropical tuna purse seine fishery (2015, background): “A significant amount of this purse seine fishing effort is focused on the use of drifting Fish Aggre - gating Devices (FADs) to increase catch rates and reduce search time (Dagorn et al. 2013).”