Dear Colleagues,
We are glad to share with you our new publication on spatial and
temporal co-occurence between mortality areas of common dolphins in the
Bay of Biscay (NE Atlantic) and fishing effort.
Peltier H, Authier M, Caurant F, Dabin W, Daniel P, Dars C, Demaret F,
Meheust E, Van Canneyt O, Spitz J and Ridoux V (2021) In the Wrong Place
at the Wrong Time: Identifying Spatiotemporal Co-occurrence of Bycaught
Common Dolphins and Fisheries in the Bay of Biscay (NE Atlantic) From
2010 to 2019. /Front. Mar. Sci./ 8:617342. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2021.617342
The paper can be downloaded at:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.617342/full
Please note that a corrigendum is also available:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.704005/full
All the best,
Hélène Peltier and co-authors
------------------------------------------
Abstract:
The first Unusual Mortality Event (UME) related to fishing activity
along the Atlantic coast recorded by the French Stranding Network was in
1989: 697 small delphinids, mostly common dolphins, washed ashore, most
of them with evidence of having been bycaught. Since then, UMEs of
common dolphins have been observed nearly every year in the Bay of
Biscay; unprecedented records were broken every year since 2016. The low
and unequally distributed observation efforts aboard fishing vessels in
the Bay of Biscay, as well as the lack of data on foreign fisheries
necessitated the use of complementary data (such as stranding data) to
elucidate the involvement of fisheries in dolphin bycatch. The aim of
this work was to identify positive spatial and temporal correlations
between the likely origins of bycaught stranded common dolphins
(estimated from a mechanistic drift model) and fishing effort statistics
inferred from Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data on vessels >12 m long.
Fisheries whose effort correlated positively with dolphin mortality
areas after 2016 included French midwater trawlers, French Danish
seiners, French gillnetters, French trammel netters, Spanish bottom
trawlers, and Spanish gillnetters. For the French fleet only, logbook
declarations, sales, and surveys carried out by Ifremer were integrated
into fishing effort data. Six fleets were active in common dolphin
bycatch areas at least twice between 2016 and 2019: gillnetters fishing
hake, trammel netters fishing anglerfish, bottom pair trawlers fishing
hake, midwater pair trawlers fishing sea bass and hake, and Danish
seiners fishing whiting. Except for changes in hake landings in some
fisheries, there were no notable changes in total fishing effort
practice (gear or target species) based on the data required by the ICES
and Council of the European Union that could explain the large increase
in stranded common dolphins recorded along the French Atlantic coast
after 2016. Small scale or unrecorded changes could have modified
interactions between common dolphins and fisheries, but could not be
detected through mandatory data-calls. The recent increase in strandings
of bycaught common dolphins could have been caused by changes in their
distribution and/or ecology, or changes in fishery practices that were
undetectable through available data.
------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
MARMAM mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/marmam
