Mitigating adverse ecological impacts of open ocean fisheries.
The MADE project was a European research project, aimed at proposing measures to mitigate adverse impacts of fisheries targeting large pelagic fish in the open ocean, focusing on tropical tuna purse seiners using fish aggregating devices FADs and pelagic longliners, through the development of appropriate knowledge on the behavioural ecology of species, as well as on the fisheries themselves. The project studied large pelagic fisheries all over the world Oceans.
In the Mediterranean Sea, the main objectives of the study were: the spatiotemporal analysis of the by-catches of the swordfish fishery in the area and the examination of the ecology and behavior of the most abundant species, aiming to propose mitigation measures to reduce their catches. For this reason, electronic tagging with satellite tags on juvenile swordfish, which is the most abundant unwanted incidental catch in the Mediterranean swordfish fishery, was made for the first time on young’s of the year fishes to investigate the vertical and horizontal movements, together with instrumented fishing with hook timers and depth-temperature sensors.
Also fishery data collected from observers on board were analyzed. Details about the project and first results are available in the followings: