ARE THE OCTOPUS POTS USED BY THE MAURITANIAN SMALL-SCALE FISHERY DANGEROUS FOR THE RESOURCE?

摘要

The common octopus Octopus vulgaris is very abundant off the coast of NW Africa, where it is exploited on such a large scale that it is the most valuable fishery product of Mauritania (Jouffre, 1998). Trawling for this species has been active on this shelf since the late 1960s (Hatanaka, 1979; Caddy, 1983; Guerra, 1997) and a small-scale fishery using canoes (also called an "artisanal fishery" in the sense of Gulland and Garcia (1984)), commenced in Mauritania in the late 1980s targeting the same resource (Lamboeuf, 1997). Conflict between the industrial and artisanal sectors has resulted in accusations by the industrial sector that the pots used by the artisanal fishers are selective for brooding females and therefore endangering the resource (Dia et al, 1996). The present study was initiated to determine the selectivity of the pots and thereby to answer this issue.