ABSTRACT
Bycatch mortality has caused population declines for diverse species, especially marine "megafauna" and imminently threatens the very existence of some populations. Bycatch the incidental catch of nontarget species, or any unregulated or unmanaged catch is a well-known and globally ubiquitous fisheries reproached on the basis of wastefully harming animals and ecosystems. This chapter describes a potential management framework based on the use of LRPs to determine maximum sustainable bycatch levels, and Bayesian inference to evaluate the probability of exceeding the LRPs given past, current and future fishing effort levels. Probabilistic inference is needed because bycatch must be estimated from sample observer data. This is a newly proposed approach, not formally adopted by managers in the United States, but developed in the context of a particular US management issue: bycatch of Pacific leatherback turtles in the California drift gillnet (CDGN) fishery off the west coast of the United States.
