Derelict gear from an illegal fishery: Lessons from gear retrieval efforts in the Upper Gulf of California

Abstract

The Gulf of California illegal fishery for totoaba (a CITES Appendix I-listed fish species since 1977) has led to socio-ecological degradation. Particularly, this fishery is well known for incidentally catching the critically endangered vaquita. However, its impacts on the larger ecosystem are understudied. For decades local experts and non-governmental organizations had reported large amounts of in-use and derelict fishing gear used for totoaba in the Upper Gulf of California (UGoC), but the issued remained unstudied. Six of the co-authors participated directly in gear retrieval efforts and their experience is recorded here. We also performed a literature review to collect a) information on the history, dimension, root causes and impacts of gear discarding practices, and b) lessons drawn from the inter-institutional gear recovery effort performed between 2016 and 2020. For this last objective, we used the Inter-Institutional Gap Framework (IIG). By mapping all institutions involved and their relationships, the IIG allows to identify coordination gaps among multi-level institutions. We found that the gear recovery allowed to bridge historical gaps between formal and informal institutions in the UGoC. The results of the gear recovery effort (9.3 tons of intercepted nets within a section of the UGoC) also helped illustrate the large scope of the problem, which seems to be caused by local oceanographic conditions and the fishers’ need to avoid enforcement. Our study provides a first estimation of the size of this problem and adds to a body of literature on the relationship between illegal fisheries and gear discarding.