Contributions of small-scale and longline fishing to sea turtle mortality in the Solomon Islands
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Hamilton, Richard
Vuto, Simon
Atu, Willie
Masu, Rosalie
Ramofafia, Christain
Waldie, Pete
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A focus of sea turtle management has been reducing bycatch in commercial fisheries, but sustainable harvest for consumption is also an important objective in many nations. Identifying how much different fisheries contribute to turtle mortality could help focus limited management resources. We estimated national scale turtle catches for two fisheries in the Solomon Islands: a small-scale reef fishery where turtles are caught for food and sale, and an offshore longline fishery where turtles are bycatch. The footprint of the longline fishery spanned the entire exclusive economic zone of the Solomon Islands and was 67 times bigger than the footprint of the small-scale fishery. The median catch summed across both fisheries was ∼12,000 turtles in 2018, with 85%–97% of that catch in the small-scale fishery. We suggest that turtle management in the Solomon Islands, a nation with globally significant turtle breeding populations, should focus on sustainable management of small-scale coastal fisheries.
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Conservation Letters
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© 2024 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Brown, C; Hamilton, R; Vuto, S; Atu, W; Masu, R; Ramofafia, C; Waldie, P, Contributions of small-scale and longline fishing to sea turtle mortality in the Solomon Islands, Conservation Letters, 2024, pp. e13056