Angler preferences and satisfaction in a high-threshold bucket-list recreational fishery

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It is important to understand recreational anglers’ motivations for fishing in order to predict when, where, and how they interact with species that can be sensitive to overfishing. So far, few studies have investigated angler motivation in recreational fisheries that are extremely distant from their angler population, require specialized angler skill, and pose other barriers to participation like high travel and equipment costs. We collectively refer to these as “high-threshold” fisheries and explore angler motivation and its implications for anglers’ decision-making in one particularly remote example, the Mongolian fly fishery for endangered taimen, Hucho taimen, the largest salmonid in the world. We used a mixed-methods approach that enriched discrete choice experiments with in-depth qualitative interview data to investigate anglers’ motivations for participating in the taimen fishery, their satisfaction with the fishing experience, and their stated interest in participating in the fishery in the future. We found that anglers preferred fewer high-quality, trophy-sized fish to a higher catch rate of smaller taimen, but that activity-general factors like the opportunity to travel to an “exotic” wilderness destination were also highly motivating. The anglers we sampled were all first-time taimen fishermen and many were bucket-list anglers who sought a wide variety of fishing tourism experiences throughout their lifetime and therefore and had no intention to return to the taimen fishery. Instead, these fishermen selected their future trips from among a set of similarly remote, specialized, and costly fisheries throughout the world, especially in developing countries. We argue that these high-threshold fisheries should not be studied in isolation but instead would benefit from a unified research approach that accounts for their unique traits and shared angler population.