Wherever there is fishing, there is bycatch

Large industrial fisheries, small artisanal fisheries, coastal fisheries, high seas fisheries – all around the world fishing creates vast amounts of bycatch.

The main reason for this is that modern fishing gear is very strong, often covers an extensive area and can be highly unselective - meaning it efficiently catches the target species…as well as many other creatures.

This is further compounded by poor fisheries management that does little to minimize bycatch, for example:

• Although devices to minimize turtle bycatch are required in some fisheries, lack of enforcement / political will means these necessary steps are not taken and as a result turtle numbers continue to decline
• In the Asian tropical shrimp trawl fisheries, massive bycatches of juvenile and small fish are generated. Once termed ‘trash fish’, this bycatch is now often marketed and so there is little incentive for fishers to implement the bycatch reduction devices that will allow these fish to escape.
• Indeed, some policies actually create an incentive to discard! For example, the phenomena known as ‘High Grading’ is a consequence of the quota management system (a fish quota refers to the amount of fish one is legally allowed to catch) where there is an incentive for fishers to only land the most valuable of those species for which they have a quota and so the smaller, less valuable fish are dumped overboard!
• As another example, different commercial fish species often live together and are therefore caught together. So the directed catch of one species may well result in non-allowable catches of another! This is a particular problem in the Grand Banks off Canada, for example, where, despite a ban on cod fishing now lasting well over a decade, cod recovery is prevented as its juveniles are caught as other fish are sought.

The problem is compounded as the survival rate of discarded animals is often low.

Widespread illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing adds to this awful problem by ignoring regulations on net mesh sizes, quotas, permitted fishing areas, and any bycatch mitigation measures.