Reinventing fisheries management in the Western Atlantic: Involving fishers in prediction, verification, monitoring and protection of spawning aggregations

Groupers and snappers comprise most of the highly desired and heavily exploited fishes in the US South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and the wider Caribbean. These fishes support commercial and recreational fishing, dive tourism,... [ view full abstract ]

Groupers and snappers comprise most of the highly desired and heavily exploited fishes in the US South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and the wider Caribbean. These fishes support commercial and recreational fishing, dive tourism, and coastal food security and culture. Sustainable management of these valuable resources is an important, large-scale social and scientific challenge for several reasons. Target species’ ranges typically transcend the territorial boundaries of the managing states. Many species are long-lived and migrate to spawn in aggregations, where they are particularly vulnerable to fishing. Traditional management of these fishes is based on stock assessments but the data to run assessment models are difficult and expensive to collect. As a result, many snappers and grouper species are considered data-limited stocks where traditional stock assessment methods are not applicable and species have experienced significant declines.

Meanwhile, fishers that depend on these resources have had only limited involvement in data collection or management of the resources on which they depend. Yet fishers maintain intimate local ecological knowledge (LEK) of the resources and spend many hours on the water. With broad collaboration from fishermen, scientists, and managers the author lead the development of a shared protocol for monitoring of reef fish spawning aggregations starting in 1998. Collaborative use of the system led to fisher support for legislation to protect 11 spawning sites in Belize in 2003. The system is still in use in Belize, Mexico, Honduras and the Cayman Islands and is being expanded to include the US South Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The ultimate aim is the development of a network of individuals and institutions that share a protocol for monitoring and protection of spawning sites which in turn will support better stock assessments, shared regional management, and the recovery of snapper grouper stocks throughout the Western Atlantic.