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La pêche thonière à Dakar en 1972
... Within a few years, the minor purse fishery became the most important in terms of catches (Ariz et al., 1999). Until 1975 and the improvement of onboard conservation of catches, fishing activities remained in the coastal area where purse seiners mainly targeted yellowfin tuna free schools and to a lesser extent skipjack and bigeye tuna (Champagnat and Le Marrec, 1972;Ariz et al., 1999;Figure 1.7) In the Western Pacific Ocean and in the Indian Ocean, traditional fisheries had long used natural logs to catch tropical tunas (Fonteneau et al., 2000). ...
Since the mid 1990s, the use of drifting Fish Aggregating Devices (dFADs) by purse seiners, artificial objects specifically designed to aggregate fish, has become an important mean of catching tropical tunas. In recent years, the massive deployments of dFADs, as well as the massive use of tracking devices on dFADs and natural floating objects, such as GPS buoys, have raised serious concerns for tropical tuna stocks, bycatch species and pelagic ecosystem functioning. Despite these concerns, relatively little is known about the modalities of GPS buoy tracked objects use, making it difficult to assess and manage of the impacts of this fishing practice. To fill these knowledge gaps, we have analyzed GPS buoy tracks provided by the three French fishing companies operating in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, representing a large proportion of the floating objects monitored by the French fleet. These data were combined with multiple sources of information: logbook data, Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) tracks of French purse seiners, information on support vessels and Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) of purse seine skippers to describe GPS buoy deployment strategies, estimate the total number of GPS buoy equipped dFADs used in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, measure the contribution of strategies with FOBs and support vessels to the fishing efficiency of tropical tuna purse seiners, identify potential damages caused by lost dFADs and finally to propose management options for tropical tuna purse seine FOB fisheries. Results indicate clear seasonal patterns of GPS buoy deployment in the two oceans, a rapid expansion in the use of dFADs over the last 7 years with an increase of 4.2 times in the Indian Ocean and 7.0 times in the Atlantic Ocean, possible damages to fragile coastal ecosystems with 10% of GPS buoy tracks ending with a beaching event and an increased efficiency of tropical tuna purse seine fleets from 3.9% to 18.8% in the Atlantic Ocean over 2003-2014 and from 10.7% to 26.3% in the Indian Ocean. Interviews with purse seine skippers underlined the need for a more efficient management of the fishery, including the implementation of catch quotas, a limitation of the capacity of purse seine fleets and a regulation of the use of support vessels. These results represent a first step towards better assessment and management of purse seine FOB fisheries.
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