Abstract

The use of fish aggregating devices (FADs) in the Caribbean has increased dramatically in recent decades (Sadusky et al. 2018, CRFM 2015). Pelagic FADs, primarily used by industrial purse seine fisheries, have been promoted as a means to increase fishing efficiency and food security in developing areas and shift fishing pressure off of degraded inshore areas (Gentner et al. 2018, Mathieu et al. 2014). Moored FADs tend to be artisanal in nature and are used primarily by small-scale hook-and-line fishers. These moored FADs are common in the Greater Caribbean region, where they been adopted and have quickly proliferated in certain areas (Figure 1). For example, rapid adoption of FAD fishing has led to more than 400 estimated FADs deployed around the island of Guadeloupe (Guyader et al. 2017) and as many as 2500 off the southeastern coast of the Dominican Republic (Gentner et al. 2018). While FADs have been widely introduced across the Greater Caribbean, existing FAD fisheries vary dramatically even amongst neighboring islands in terms of participation, construc-tion techniques, placement, longevity, fishing practices, and catch. Despite the recent expansion of Caribbean FAD use and current efforts to further promote them, there has been limited research investigating the extent of Caribbean FAD fisheries and the variation in these fisheries across islands.

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