Joanna Alfaro Shigueto

Experimental Trial of Acoustic Alarms to Reduce Small Cetacean by Catch by Gillnets in Peru

In Peru, small cetacean bycatch in Peruvian artisanal fisheries peaked in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s at approximately 15-20,000 animals annually. A national law banning dolphin capture, trade and consumption was implemented in 1995. However, through an onboard observer program in the artisanal fishery to assess the ban’s effectiveness, we have shown that the mortality rate and estimated total take of small cetaceans remain very high.

The fishing gear that causes the greatest impact is the artisanal driftnet for sharks and rays. This fishery primarily operates mainly from March through mid-September and the species impacted include the Burmeister’s porpoise, dusky dolphin, bottlenose dolphin and common dolphin.

Acoustic alarms (pingers) have shown to reduce the incidental capture rates of porpoises and dolphins. This proposed project is meant as a pilot test of pingers to be carried out in the shark gillnet fishery with the goal of determining pinger effectiveness as a deterrent for cetacean interactions. We will conduct this study from the port of Salaverry in northern Peru. Information on pinger performance will be collected by onboard observers placed on participating vessels and trained to record information on the fishing trip, set location, net characteristics, weather conditions, small cetacean interactions, target catch, and details of pinger deployment.

The overall goal of this project is to promote long term sustainability of small cetacean populations in Peru by reducing captures in artisanal gillnet fisheries. Our objectives include testing the effectiveness of acoustic alarms (pingers) on gillnet vessels at reducing small cetacean bycatch and continuing an outreach program with artisanal fishermen and government officials toward raising awareness of small cetaceans and the availability of bycatch mitigation measures. This project builds upon findings from our first RSG that small cetacean bycatch remains at a level of many thousands of animals per year of which about 50% are discarded dead.

You can read about Joanna's previous RSG project at http://www.ruffordsmallgrants.org/rsg/projects/joanna_alfaro_shigueto or for more information contact joanna@prodelphinus.org

Peoject Update: July 2009

Deployment of the pingers at Salaverry port.

So far we have completed ten fishing trips with either control or experimental sets, the latter using the pingers (acoustic alarms to deter small cetaceans) attached to the fishing net. We have data for 27 experimental and 40 control sets.

We lost two pingers (Netmark 1000) during the first sets and they were replaced with another two immediately. Another pinger cracked on the third trip and this was also replaced. However, we are learning a lot from these incidents about the process of deployment from artisanal fishing gear and ideas to make the process more fluid and less painful for the fishermen.

During the next few months we expect to maintain the frequency of fishing trips participating in this experiment. Also we just updated the website of www.prodelphinus.org with links to the Rufford website for the project.

Project Update: October 2009

We are having good progress with the pingers' effectiveness and that is very encouraging. We will soon have the pingers spaced out every 100 m instead of every 200 m. Spacing out every 100 m has shown to have a better effect in other fisheries.

Also we are now testing another pinger brand (Fumunda's), that seem better constructed and more resistant to that kind of in-water work.

Finally, we got a paper accepted to a very good journal on our past project with support of Rufford Small Grants Foundation. This is the project on dolphin bycatch that also was our first step before moving into the mitigation measures such as pingers used as deterrents for dolphins.

Final Report

Read about the activities undertaken and findings of this project in the final reports below.

File Download	Size
Final Report.doc	753.5 KB
Detailed Final Report.pdf	1.5 MB