Catch, bycatch and discards of the Galapagos Marine Reserve small-scale handline fishery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fisheries bycatch is one of the most significant marine conservation issues as valuable fish are wasted and protected species harmed with potential negative ecological and socio-economic consequences. Even though there are indications that the small-scale handline fishery of the Galapagos Marine Reserve has a low selectivity, information on its bycatch never has been published. We therefore assessed the bycatch of the Galapagos handline fishery by estimating the bycatch ratio, determining species compositions of landings and bycatch, and identifying fishers’ reasons for discarding certain individuals using onboard monitoring and interview data. Moreover, we used interview surveys to reveal historical trends in the bycatch ratio. The estimated bycatch ratio of 0.40 confirmed a low selectivity of this fishery. Characterisation of the catch resulted in a total of 19 target species which were dominated by groupers, and 53 non-target species, with grunts and groupers being most prominent. Most individuals were not landed for economic motivations, either because species (77.4%) or sizes (17.7%) are not marketable and to a lesser extent for regulatory reasons (5.9%). However, sharks were after grunts with 69% the second most often mentioned bycatch taxa during interview surveys. We found that small sized individuals of some of the most exploited species suffer high bycatch mortality because they are used as bait. Moreover, over half of interviewees perceived a historical decrease in bycatch ratios that was explained by a diversification of the catch composition due to the reduction in abundance of the traditionally most important target species. As some target species show signs of overfishing and to date there are no specific regulations for the finfish fishery in place, we recommend the investigation of different gear settings such as the use of different hooks and bait species. Furthermore, we suggest the integration of faster growing species to the local market as well as spatio-temporal closures, and minimum and maximum catch sizes for overexploited species in order to improve the selectivity and sustainability of the Galapagos handline fishery.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".