Abstract

The shrimp-trawling is one of the main fishing activities in the fishing community of Sirinhaém, state of Pernambuco, northeast Brazil. The fishing happens in front of a very touristic site, called Serrambi beach and Santo Aleixo Island. Both the fishing community as well as the tourism sector have a very negative view of the shrimp trawling fishery, seen as un-sustainable and causing a lot of damage to the marine environment, mainly because its low selectivity and consequently high amount of bycatch. The REBYC/ BRAZIL/ FAO-GEF Project started testing different bycatch reduction devices (BRDs). One of these BRDs was a square mesh panel in the trawl net. Thirty six tows were done using a square mesh panel in a trawl net bag with 35mm, simultaneously with the trawl net traditionally used by the fisherman (Double Rig System). The net with the BRD had a significant reduction of fish bycatch, both by weight (?= 0.00942) and number (-43.4%) (?= 0.000571), without significantly affecting the production by weight of white shrimp (? = 0.159), pink shrimp (? = 0.981) and seabob shrimp (? = 0.619). The trawl net with the device captured an average of 145.8 fish, while the fisherman's net caught an average of 284.0 fish. These results show that the device significantly improved the sustainability of the shrimp-trawl fishery, by reducing the bycatch of young fish, without impacting shrimp catches.

PDF Preview