Abstract

The artisanal shrimp fishery in Guyana is important for livelihood and food security, involving around 300 vessels, owned and crewed exclusively by Guyanese nationals. This fishery uses Chinese seine gear and operates in major river estuaries. It primarily targets penaeid shrimps, but also retains some finfish and discards a significant, but undocumented, quantity of smaller finfish bycatch. Lack of knowledge regarding the bycatch is a concern for fishery management and bio-diversity conservation. In this study, we quantify for the first time, the finfish bycatch discards through onboard observa-tions of a typical vessel operating in the Demerara estuary. A total of 16 day-trips involving 83 seine hauls were made over July-August 2016. For every haul, wet weights of the unsorted catch, the retained catch and the finfish discards were rec-orded, and a sub-sample of finfish discards was taken to determine their taxonomic composition and size-frequency. Examination of 2,012 discarded finfish revealed high taxonomic diversity. A total of 32 species were recorded, most of which are considered by the IUCN Red List as being of ‘Least Concern,’ whilst 11 are listed as ‘Not Assessed’. The vast majority of the finfish discards were small (mean size: 11.9 cm FL; 72.7 g) and included 15 species of commercial importance to other fisheries in Guyana. On average 9.1 kg of unsorted catch was taken per seine haul, yielding 6.2 kg of finfish bycatch (69.5% of the catch) to be discarded. These results demonstrate that a significant amount of finfish is being wasted by this fishery.

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