gulf of california shrimp
fishery improvement partnership
Our developing partnership in Mexico’s Gulf of California shrimp fishery aims to reduce bycatch and habitat impacts through two market-driven programs:
- Linking conscientious seafood buyers to a group of fishermen who are early adopters of low-impact gear and bycatch-reduction devices;
- Enlisting major retailers and users of shrimp from the region in a dialogue with fishermen and processors to identify and pursue feasible improvements in the entire fishery.
In 2007 we identified the types of gear modifications to be adopted, testing their effectiveness, and deployed monitoring systems on several trawlers to provide assurances to buyers that the shrimp landed in Mexican ports by these vessels was indeed caught by these gears. We placed private observers on vessels to verify that the gears were being deployed correctly and functioning as intended. We also deployed – for the first time in the fishery – an electronic catch registration system (or electronic log-book) on the participating boats to monitor their location and catches.
The results of this test demonstrated that vessels using improved trawl doors, nets, turtle-excluder devices and by-catch reduction devices could make a substantial difference in reducing by-catch and benthic impacts. While no vessels are currently using the monitoring system we are discussing with various fishing companies programs to deploy these improvements on a larger scale.
The catch registration system was developed and installed by De Haan Automatisering and is a modification of part of the tried and tested Young’s Trace system. SFP thanks Young’s Seafood for their permission and support to allow us to visit Scottish scampi fisheries and see the system in action.