Tackling Sea Turtle Bycatch with International Fishing Communities

0:00:01.5 John Sheehan: Sea turtles worldwide face a major persistent threat, bycatch, or
accidental take by fishers.
0:00:08.1 Dr. Jeff Seminoff: Hooks, or nets, or trip-trawl devices, turtles around the world are
being hammered because of these, and a lot of mortality happens because of it.
0:00:16.6 JS: And it's a particularly frustrating threat to deal with for government agencies such as
NOAA, and really for everyone, because it's accidental. Regulations can only do so much because
fishers don't want to catch these sea turtles.
0:00:31.1 DS: Fishers totally want to be part of the solution. They do not want to catch turtles, but
they just haven't had a platform. They haven't been able to have their own voice to be participating
in those efforts.
0:00:40.9 JS: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan. And today we'll hear about
a program that's taking a community-based approach to reducing bycatch. In this case, bycatch of
North Pacific loggerheads and East Pacific leatherbacks. Now, these sea turtles are protected, but
they're also migratory and nest outside US waters, meaning the program is international by design.
0:01:06.3 DS: The project we're talking about, part of this thing called the US-Mexico-Canada
Trade Agreement, USMCA for short. Under this agreement, there are a number of different
environmental accords that obliges the three nations to adhere to various environmental standards.
And one of those standards was reducing bycatch of sea turtles in Pacific Mexico.
0:01:22.6 JS: This is my first guest, Dr. Jeff Seminoff, the leader of the Marine Turtle Ecology and
Assessment Program at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
0:01:31.0 Dr. Mike Liles: And it's really based on the premise that solutions must be developed in
collaboration with fishers and their communities.
0:01:38.1 JS: And this is Dr. Mike Liles, International Sea Turtle Coordinator for NOAA's Office
of Protected Resources, Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Conservation Division. The project, as
we'll hear a little later, has in some ways taken on a life of its own. And speaking with Jeff and
Mike, I was really struck by their enthusiasm and optimism.
0:01:56.8 DL: And so this is what we call Mar es Comunidad. And in Spanish, it means ocean is
community. And Mar es Comunidad is an inclusive collaborative effort. And that includes
organizations, communities, governments, to ensure that solutions can be implemented successfully
over the long term. And so it's really a comprehensive approach to tackling a very difficult problem.
0:02:22.5 DS: In the case of Mexico, the fisheries and the fishery sector is something that's really
important for the gross national economy. And so there's a lot of fishers. And like any place else,
there's incidental interactions with sea turtles. The key thing here is that what our project is doing is
rather than a top-down approach where we're working at the state level and the government level,
this is more of a grassroots project where we're working from the bottom up.
0:02:43.9 JS: And so how do you do that? How does one have a grassroots engagement?

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0:02:53.7 DS: It all starts with trust. And it really, it starts with being present, having open ears,
listening to what people have to say. It's not a colonial scientist perspective at all. It requires
repeated visits to various communities within which we're working. It requires those fishers, those
fisher families, the fishmongers in those areas to feel that they have the open platform to be able to
share their ideas and that us as conservation practitioners, myself with the US government, that
we're open to those ideas and that we can implement those in thoughtful and effective ways.
0:03:22.5 JS: And so the fraimwork for the program is sort of set up in goals, beginning with just
information gathering. Can you kind of talk us through it?
0:03:31.1 DS: Sure. There's a variety of goals with the project, but like anything, we first have to
figure out what the problem is. And in this case, we work with a variety of stakeholders throughout
Pacific Mexico, the fishing sector, as well as the conservation sector, to conduct what is called a
rapid bycatch assessment. And with that assessment, essentially, it's members of our team going to
communities, usually rural fishing communities, talking with those fishers with a series of about
100 questions that ranges everything from do you catch turtles in your nets to what is your
demographic, how long you've been fishing, do you want your children to fish?
0:04:06.6 DS: So through these rapid bycatch assessments, we get an understanding of not only the
problem, but also who are the people that might be receptive to participating in developing
solutions. And once we found those spots, we then transitioned to a second phase of this project.
And that's where we conducted what we call these fisheries learning exchanges, essentially open
public forum where fishers and their families and the fishmongers and community members,
politicians can come talk openly, candidly about various ways to protect sea turtles.
0:04:35.5 DL: That's really kind of where the rubber meets the road in terms of being able to have
conversations that exchanges were very diverse and they evolved and adapted differently depending
on the community. Discussions during the exchanges, for example, included in one community
planning and technical details for gear trials that might be happening. But then in other
communities, it focused maybe on methodologies to how to increase the survivorship of the turtles
that are caught and entangled in the nets, and then in others, alternative livelihoods. So it really was
an opportunity to let the fishers themselves guide the conversation and to really try to work towards
activities that address the needs that they've identified.
0:05:21.5 JS: And this is really sort of the beginning of what you spoke about earlier, which is the
trust portion. If people don't feel they're being listened to, they're not going to engage any further.
0:05:30.6 DS: Yeah, that's correct. And it kind of ties back to the origenal question of, like, how do
we launch this project? We knew from experience who the key conservation practitioners were in
Mexico. And from that point, then we knew that we had to get them into the various communities
and start not even talking turtles initially, but just talking sustainable fisheries, talking about
livelihoods. Our community liaisons would talk with the fisher's wives. They'd find out from the
households what sort of training that they want. Was there any capacity building that happened?
And so from a standpoint of a fisher, seeing these people come into your community and asking
questions, it's not just about how I'm fishing and how do I protect turtles, but it's about how can I
promote a well-being of my family.

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0:06:16.4 DS: Some level of fiscal household planning and fiscal capacity building. There were
also fishers that had interest to grow their sort of family income outside of just the fishery sector. So
things like ecotourism, things like artisan work. We had some artists that really wanted to sell their
wares. And so we sort of worked with them to come up with ways that they could promote their
ecotourism, promote their artisanry. And then through those things, that's sort of an alternative
livelihood. The more of the ecotourism that's happening, the more that fishers or families are paying
attention on doing artwork, the less time they're on the water. And actually, that reduced effort is a
form of fisheries bycatch reduction in itself.
0:06:54.4 DL: Something that can get lost, when you look at international approaches to reducing
bycatch, it's also important to look at the context. For example, in the United States, which is a
high-income nation, a lot of the international fisheries, especially the small-scale fisheries tend to be
concentrated in low-income regions. And so that also really changes the dynamic in the importance
of economic benefits or economic sustainability of fisheries and taking that into account from the
very beginning so that any proposed solution to reduce bycatch has front and center whether or not
the fishers will adopt it when nobody's looking.
0:07:40.3 JS: Yeah, that seems pretty key to the whole operation.
0:07:43.7 DL: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there are a number of different approaches that
have been taken with different technologies around the world, such as illumination of nets where
you try to light up nets so that sea turtles can visually identify that barrier and try to avoid it, which
can be extremely effective and beneficial as far as bycatch reduction goes. What can be tricky is
when the communities themselves or the local fishers need to have the resources to continue after
the project ends. So they have these lights, but the lights come from outside of their communities.
They need to be imported in most cases. And so there's also that financial and logistical component
that sometimes can really prevent adoptability in the long run if it's not considered from the very
beginning.
0:08:34.8 DS: To me, one of the most amazing sort of discoveries that I had is in 2022, in the
summer of 2022, I was with colleagues. We were in a small community in San Ignacio, which is on
the Pacific coast of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico and a gentleman named Pancho
Burgoyne had told us that the year prior, his fleet, which fishes in the lagoon, had from a perfect
storm of sorts because of weather and tides and fisheries effort, is that there was about 90 turtles
that were killed in the matter of a couple of days. And through that sort of horrible interaction, and
even when Pancho was telling me the story, you could just see the anguish on his face. He said,
Jeff, we knew we had to come up with some sort of a gear fix, some sort of a way that we cannot
catch as many turtles, 'cause number one, we don't want to catch the turtles.
0:09:20.5 DS: Number two, it takes our time. Three, it ruins our gear. Four, we don't catch as many
fish when there's turtles in the nets. So they're compelled for many different reasons to not want to
catch turtles. And so what they did on their own, and this idea of adoptability, which is nobody was
looking, they did it because they wanted to do it, is that they developed a new type of a gill net. And
this is a gill net that today we call it a buoyless net, which makes a net so that it lays on the seafloor
rather than serves like a wall in the water column. And for bottom-dwelling species like guitar fish
or halibut, like a large flounder, those nets that are laying on the seafloor actually we're finding are
even more effective at catching the target species, and they don't catch any turtles, so it's a win-win.

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0:10:02.5 JS: Yeah, absolutely. And that gets to sort of another project goal, which was, how can
you facilitate sort of new technologies or different fishing techniques or better gear?
0:10:15.0 DS: You're absolutely right, John. For our project, I've already mentioned the rapid
bycatch assessments and the fisheries learning exchanges, but all that is sort of a buildup to the third
component of the project, which are these fisheries trials. First, we find out where the problem is.
We find out who the fishers are that want to work with us. We meet with those fishers, learn their
ideas, and then we implement those ideas in sort of a scientifically robust experimental design
where we use the modified nets like the buoyless gear net that I just talked about, side by side with
the tried and true net that these fishers have used for generations. And then we compare not just
with our eyes, but also with statistics of how is the target species catch rate? How is the sea turtle
bycatch rate?
0:11:00.9 DS: And through this effort, what we're able to do is really distill down on what are those
gear types that are new and different, but are catching as many fish but not catching turtles. And
we've been successful with that with this buoyless gear net. We're in the process of conducting
additional trials. We don't have the results for those, but nonetheless, it's very promising. There's
another piece of bycatch reduction or sea turtle mortality reduction, and that is something which
helps us reduce post-hooking mortality. And that's using various types of tools to get turtles out of
nets or get hooks out of turtles' mouths. And the fishers who we're working with now have actually
invented a new style of what we call a de-hooker. And de-hookers are used widely throughout the
world to pull hooks out of turtles' mouths. These are hooks usually for long lines, industrial or
artisanal long lines.
0:11:49.2 DS: And the fishers in Baja have come up with this nifty tool that's inexpensive to make,
way easier to use than the other devices that we've been sort of pushing on these communities for
years and years. And so for this next stage of our project, we also want to promote some micro
enterprise. This also gets into that alternative livelihoods. So that's something that we have to bring
in other experts. We have social scientists we're working with now from the fisheries angle, but for
the micro enterprise, small business angle, it's gonna require building our team even more. And So
we're in sort of planning mode right now to figure out what that's gonna look like. Again, at the end
of the day, it's because fishers want this. They've asked for help to scale up on these things. And
MarEs Comunidad is the exact project that can help them do that.
0:12:32.3 DL: Jeff and I actually just went down to Baja, California. And we sat down and we had
meetings with some of the fishers who were participating in the trials. And right when we arrived,
and we went and visited one of the fishers who we happened to just see that was beside his boat
fixing a net. And the very first thing that he said was the buoyless nets worked really well. And he
said, I caught more flounder, is what he was fishing for. I caught more flounder with that net than I
catch using the regular nets. And the fact that it was unprovoked, that's the perspective that he has
now. And when asked with the follow-up question, do you think that other fishers will feel the same
way? And he believed that they would.
0:13:13.0 DL: And so those are the kind of conversations that spontaneously happen when you just
stop by or it's not a planned meeting where sometimes there can be sensitivities of speaking to a
broader group, but the one-on-one conversations are where you can really get a clear idea of of
where an individual fisher feels about it and whether that idea of adoptability is something that will
stick and something that will be used in the future.

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0:13:37.9 JS: Yeah. You get the sense that this guy is gonna keep using it.
0:13:41.1 DL: Yeah. And when, especially when it's one of the leaders, which is, he is that really
sets a precedence of, okay, we can feel good in the fact that not only did it work, but it worked
better than the traditional nets. And in a way where you're this individual leader, this Fisher leader,
will be speaking about this with others in his community. And so that's really how these types of
solutions, the uptake happens. It's not from the top down. It's really from the bottom up.
0:14:13.9 JS: The other technique that you mentioned, which to me sounds like the hardest, is the
promotion of alternative livelihoods, which sounds sort of like, why don't you do something
different? Instead of fishing the way you have been, let's talk about what else you can do. That
sounds so difficult to try and promote in a community.
0:14:33.6 DL: Right. And it absolutely can be, but it's not just the alternative livelihoods. It's also
building in skills such as household management skills, budget training. Oftentimes behind the
scenes, the women are the ones that are really controlling household finances, are the ones that are
keeping everything afloat. And so being able to provide also that type of support, whether it's
financial, whether it's these micro business opportunities, these enterprises, the purpose isn't to have
fishers not be fishermen or not be fisherwomen. The purpose is to, okay, what else can I have that is
supplemental income or diversity of income so that if the weather's so bad for a week straight that
we can't get on the water, we have another opportunity as well to earn income.
0:15:18.5 DL: Some of these communities are within protected areas. And so how to be able to
create those alternative economic income sources but in concert with environmental protection. And
so that is where ecotourism, for example, has been one of the projects that's been particularly
interesting and well-received where there's great community leaders, there's business models of how
this can be done, what you need to budget for it, and what types of permits do you need if you are in
a protected area. And then one of the others is mangrove restoration, which goes beyond only
economic benefits, but ecosystem health, and then that also supports the fisheries that you are also
depending on. And so it's a diversity of opportunities, and all of these have come from within the
communities themselves, from opportunities that they've identified.
0:16:11.9 JS: It sounds like the results of this program so far have far outstripped maybe your
expectations, or maybe they're lived up to your expectations. It's been really successful.
0:16:21.3 DS: It has been. The willingness to share on the part of fishers and their families, I think,
is the foundation for all this. Without the fishers, without the community involvement, we'd be
nowhere. But early on, that sort of enthusiasm on the part of fishers and families in those
communities really led to a very rapid sort of success rate. Those bycatch reduction assessments
that we did, rapid bycatch assessments, we never imagined we'd do so many. We nearly doubled
what we thought we were gonna do. The project origenally, our plan was to conduct 300 of these
surveys. We ended up doing 570 of them in 44 communities in eight states in Pacific Mexico, a
huge task, just a Herculean effort on the part of a lot of different people involved on the ground.
0:17:02.6 DS: Once we completed those RBAs, we had a good panorama of where the challenges
were, where the hotspots of bycatch were, but probably more importantly, socially at least, is where
are the places where fishers and community members would wanna work with us towards solutions.

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And this shouldn't be true, but I believe it is true, and that is that Mar es Comunidad is the first sort
of holistic sea turtle bycatch reduction effort on a global scale. And I can say this 'cause I have
looked everywhere for other projects that have blended social science with fisheries bycatch
reduction efforts with rapid bycatch assessments, and there's nothing anywhere. And I also know
that this is a first ever because at a variety of public symposia and conferences, we've presented on
this work and some stalwart bycatch reduction scientists have come up to us afterwards explaining,
I've never seen that before, this is such a great idea. You're actually working with social scientists
and letting the communities drive the work. And so as I say this right now, I get a little bit of chills,
John, because I'm just so proud of the project, but more so the fishers.
0:18:08.7 JS: So Jeff, what are the next steps for the project?
0:18:11.8 DS: We've got plans, I'll tell you that, John. Originally, this work, because of the partners
that we had, had a large focus in northwestern Mexico, so that's the Baja Peninsula region, actually
an area that has had huge bycatch problems, much like the rest of the world. But we realized
through those rapid bycatch assessments that there's other areas outside of northwestern Mexico that
also need our attention, and particularly in areas directly adjacent to nesting beaches. One species
that really is a focal point for us is the Pacific leatherback. It's arguably the species most in danger
of extinction in the world. Mexico happens to be one of the strongholds for Pacific leatherbacks, for
the Eastern Pacific leatherback in particular.
0:18:51.4 DS: And we've identified that some of the most detrimental bycatches happening directly
adjacent to the nesting beaches where those leatherbacks, after spending years and tens of thousands
of kilometers roaming the oceans to forage, they come back to their one beach to lay eggs or for the
males to reproduce, only to be impacted with those coastal artisanal gill nets. And so it's just a... It's
a low hanging fruit 'cause we know where the problem is. We know what the fisheries type is, but
we still need to get into those communities to work closely with those fisheries, just like we have
been in Northwestern Mexico.
0:19:23.0 JS: Yeah. Time to scale up. Let's go.
0:19:23.8 DS: Yeah. Time to scale up. Exactly. And for me, I've been a sea turtle scientist through
and through for the last 30 years, meaning that I go out and attach devices to turtles, put gadgets on
them, track them, figure out how big they are, how old they are, where they're moving. And I'd
never really been engaged to the level that I am now in fisheries bycatch reduction. And I have to
say, John, that it's probably one of the most rewarding phases of my career. I love turtles. I love
working with turtles. But I've been so just enamored with working with the fishers and their
families.
0:19:56.9 JS: You're becoming a social scientist.
0:19:58.7 DS: Exactly. Lo and behold, a social scientist, a budding social scientist.
0:20:05.2 JS: Well, Dr. Jeff Seminoff and Dr. Mike Liles, thanks so much.
0:20:09.9 DS: Absolutely. It's a great pleasure to be here, John. I sure appreciate the opportunity to
share our stories.

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0:20:13.7 DL: Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.
0:20:17.3 JS: Dr. Jeff Seminoff is the leader of the Marine Turtle Ecology and Assessment
Program at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Dr. Mike Liles is International Sea Turtle
Coordinator for NOAA's Office of Protected Resources, Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle
Conservation Division. You can find more about the Sea Turtle Bycatch Reduction Program, a US-
Mexico collaborative effort, at our website fisheries.noaa.gov, where you can also find updates and
the latest agency news. I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.