An interview-based approach to assess sea turtle bycatch in Italian waters
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
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Abstract
The loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta, Linnaeus, 1758) is the most abundant sea turtle species in the Mediterranean Sea, where commercial fishing appears to be the main driver of mortality. So far, information on sea turtle bycatch in Italy is limited both in space and time due to logistical problems in data collected through onboard observations and on a limited number of vessels involved. In the present study, sea turtle bycatch in Italian waters was examined by collecting fishermen's information on turtle bycatch through an interview-based approach. Their replies enabled the identification of bycatch hotspots in relation to area, season and to the main gear types. The most harmful fishing gears resulted to be trawl nets, showing the highest probabilities of turtle bycatch with a hotspot in the Adriatic Sea, followed by longlines in the Ionian Sea and in the Sicily Channel. Estimates obtained by the present results showed that more than 52,000 capture events and 10,000 deaths occurred in Italian waters in 2014, highlighting a more alarming scenario than earlier studies. The work shows that in case of poor data from other sources, direct questioning of fishermen and stakeholders could represent a useful and cost-effective approach capable of providing sufficient data to estimate annual bycatch rates and identify high-risk gear/location/season combinations.
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2017. An interview-based approach to assess sea turtle bycatch in Italian waters. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2826v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2826v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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Competing Interests
Alessandro Lucchetti is a permanent researcher of the CNR-ISMAR (Ancona, Italy). Claudio Vasapollo is a research assistant at the CNR-ISMAR (Ancona, Italy). Massimo Virgili works as a technician at the CNR-ISMAR (Ancona, Italy).
Author Contributions
Alessandro Lucchetti conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Claudio Vasapollo analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Massimo Virgili performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The raw data has been supplied as a supplementary file.
Funding
This study was conducted with the contribution of the LIFE financial instrument of the European Community, project TartaLife - Reduction of sea turtle mortality in professional fishing (LIFE12 NAT/IT/000937). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.