Pescaria como unidade de gestão para o monitoramento, avaliação e mitigação da captura incidental de tartarugas marinhas na pesca

Abstract

The pelagic longline fishery in Brazil started in the mid-fifties and later expanded to the Southeast region. This fishery uses different strategies to catch tunas (Thunnus spp), swordfish (Xiphias gladius), and dolphinfish (Coriphaena hippurus). However, those strategies also affect the incidental capture of sea turtles. If the fishing strategies change according to target species and if these strategies affect the sea turtle capture, the national and regional fishery management organizations should divided the longline fisheries according to its own characteristics to better understand the incidental capture of sea turtles, their causes and consequences. Nevertheless, this approach has not been used and, usually, pelagic longline fisheries have been analyzed as a unique administrative unit, as being homogeneous when affecting the biota. On this paper the Brazilian pelagic longline fishery was divided, according to their characteristics, in five distinct fisheries. Therefore, each pelagic longline fishery was understood as the administrative unit to monitor, assess and mitigate the interaction among sea turtles and fisheries, according to Projeto Tamar’s proposal. Thus, the information about sea turtle incidental capture as well as size class captured was analyzed for each longline fishery identified. We used the information from Projeto Tamar’s database between 1999 and 2016. The results show significant differences for species composition, BPUEs and size classes by turtle specie captured on different longline fisheries. This fact has important implications for the marine turtle conservation as well as for the economy and fishing management. Finally, we recommend adopt “Fishery” as administrative unit to monitor, assess and mitigate the incidental capture of sea turtles in longline fisheries.