The hidden value of artisanal fisheries in Honduras

Abstract

Declining fisheries catches are a global trend, with management failing to keep pace with growth in fishing effort and technological advances. The economic value of Honduras’ catches was estimated within the industrial and artisanal sectors. Catches were found to be 2.9 times greater than the official statistics between 1950 and 2015. The merging of industrial and artisanal catch data masked the decline in industrial catches and hid the strong growth of artisanal fisheries. In 1996, annual artisanal fisheries landed catches surpassed the industrial fishery sector, and in 2000, the annual net value of artisanal fisheries eclipsed the value of the industrial fisheries. These data highlight the importance of artisanal fisheries in Honduras and challenge the long‐held belief that the industrial sector contributes more to the national economy. The global paucity of fisheries data highlights the need for comprehensive strategies to collect more detailed and accurate fisheries data.

A tale that never loses in the telling: Considerations for the shifting ethnobaseline based on artisanal fisher records from the southwestern Atlantic

“…These calculations were then used to estimate the difference between what was reported by the interviewed fishers and what was expected based on length-weight relationships. Maximum known sizes for the reported species were obtained from the Fish-Base platform (Froese and Pauly 2019). Comparison between the recorded weights and lengths reported by artisanal fisher respondents and the recalculated values based on the LWR from the literature were made in order to evaluate differences for all fishes and the three size classes.…”

“…The interviews carried out herein indicate that over 10% of the reports concerning fish abundance and size decreases refer to sharks, especially G. cuvier, a large shark that can reach over 7 m and 800 kg (Froese and Pauly 2019;IGFA 2019), comprising more than 40% of elasmobranch reports. The case of the study area points to the possibility that the preference for sizes smaller than 1 m compromises the recovery capacity of populations of large fish species, such as G. cuvier, but also includes other sharks such as hammerhead sharks Sphyrna spp., spinner sharks Carcharhinus brevipinna and thresher shark Alopias spp., as also reported by Barbosa-Filho et al (2019).…”

“…This is repeated to a greater or lesser extent in several other countries, especially those in development, revealing the need to apply empirical knowledge accumulated by artisanal fishers to reconstruct fishing histories and minimize temporal data gaps (e.g. Blythe et al 2013; Saldaña-Ruiz 2017; Canty et al 2019).…”

Mapping a conservation research network to the Sustainable Development Goals

“…Projects focus on building resilience in vulnerable coastal communities, fisheries, and marine ecosystems through nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation and mitigation (SDGs 1.5,13.1,13.2,13.3,13.b). This is achieved by assessing and developing sustainable alternative livelihoods, including tourism (SDG 8.9) and small-scale fisheries to promote food security (Canty et al, 2019;Canty & Deichmann, 2022) (SDGs 1.5, 2.1, 2.2, 2.4). Recent work has found evidence that marine protected areas in the region help maintain productive fisheries (SDGs 14.2,14.4,14.5,14.7,14.a,14.b) and are associated with elevated income (SDG 1.5) and food security (SDGs 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4) of nearby coastal communities.…”

Extinction risk, reconstructed catches, and management of chondrichthyan fishes in the Western Central Atlantic Ocean

“…Even at low levels of effort, small-scale fishing can significantly reduce the biomass of slow-growing fishes such as sharks and rays (Pinnegar & Engelhard, 2008) and affect critical life stages (e.g., juveniles in possible nursery habitats; Tagliafico et al, 2021). In the WCA, the size, economic contribution, and catch of small-scale fleets has been increasing for decades (Baremore et al, 2021;Canty et al, 2019), and overfishing is occurring in nearly double the percentage of small-scale fisheries (46%) as it is in commercial fisheries (28%; Singh-Renton & McIvor, 2015). The significance of small-scale fishing is highlighted by Mexico and Venezuela, which we identified as two of the top three shark and ray fishing nations in the WCA; smallscale fishing boats comprise 97% of the marine fishing fleet in Mexico (Fernández et al, 2011), and artisanal sources supply 94% of the shark catch in Venezuela (Marquez et al, 2019;Tavares, 2019).…”