Intertidal bait gleaning on rocky shores in Kuwait

Abstract

Leptodius exaratus has been used traditionally as a bait for recreational fishing in Kuwait, however little known about the effect of this practice. The present study is the first step towards understanding the recreational fisheries in Kuwait and the indirect impact of this fishery on the intertidal rocky shore habitats through bait collection, using field and questionnaire survey approaches. Anglers catch 46 different fish species, with seven of them making up more than 70% of the reported catches. L. exaratus is considered very selective for sea breams and it represented 21.4% of intertidal gleaning catches, with an average harvesting rate of 191 crabs/collector/tide. Crab gleaners reported declines in crab abundance over time and impacts on some rocky shore habitats. Direct fishing mortality was relatively low, but habitat damage caused by gleaning high, in sites with low crab abundance and fragile rock substrate, where 80% of the rocks were turned over and more than half were broken. This indicates that development of unregulated gleaning on Kuwait shores may cause irreversible ecological impacts to sensitive intertidal habitats before legislation and effective enforcement can be put in place. Partial restriction of gleaning effort and/or catches is unlikely to be effective, so that a spatial management approach identifying habitats requiring a high level of protection is needed. The latter requires information on distribution of rocky shore habitat types, refining existing intertidal habitat classifications to inform development of a sensitivity matrix approach on sufficiently fine scale to resolve variation in sensitivity of different rocky shore types to physical disturbance.