Palm fiber as potential material for FADs: durability enhancement and increasing fish catching for small scale fisheries

Abstract

Fish aggregating devices (FADs) have brought impact on the fish catching productivity and preciseness of fishing ground. Traditional fisherman is using coconut frond and areca frond for shallow water FADs and it have been increasing cost maintenance of FADs, due to durability of natural attractor like coconut frond and areca frond tend to lower. Therefore, the research aims to determine the influence of different natural attractors of the FADs (i.e., areca frond, coconut frond and palm fiber) to impact the fish catching around the shallow water FADs. Pyramid model was used for attractors of FADs. Data were collected by experimental method, i.e., experimental fishing every two weeks until the fronds (attractors) totally rotted using hand lines (January-May 2019). The location of research is Nagan Raya Waters, Aceh Province (Hindia Ocean). One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to assess differences in the treatment value, namely natural attractors in the FADs for the fish catching number (significant level at 95%). The results showed that the different of natural attractors of the FADs were affected to fish catching around the FADs. Meanwhile, palm fiber attractor is better than to aggregate of fish around FADs, but these has not given significantly different for total catch of fish (p>0.05). Therefore, to maximize fish catch around shallow water FADs and to minimize of maintenance cost for FAD are suggested to using palm fiber attractors. This finding is very important to help traditional FADs fishery in maximizing production of fish and to increasing profit of small scale fisheries.