Vulnerabilidade de peixes de bico, atuns e afins à exploração comercial no Oceano Índico

Abstract

Ecological approaches, as for example productivity and susceptibility analysis, have been applied to assess the potential impact of industrial fisheries on fish stocks and marine species. The productivity and susceptibility analysis has been used to achieve this aim, usually in data-limited scenarios, as for example the exploitation of neritic tunas and billfishes in the Indian Ocean. Despite of many studies using the ecological approach to estimate the effects of fisheries, only quite a few studies focused on the Indian Ocean species. Furthermore, none of them have evaluated the effect of all fishery gears operating simultaneously. This study criticizes the current methods of assessing cumulative effects of fishery gears and provide an alternative to evaluate the ecological risk in a multi-fisheries scenario. The aim was to develop an alternative to cumulative susceptibility indexes and to use them for assessing the vulnerability of billfishes, tunas and tunas like to the cumulative effect of several gears taking part of the industrial exploitation in the Indian Ocean. It is expected this alternative to be robust and it might help in evaluating the ecological risks for the effects of fishing, as well as it might be provided as a tool for facilitating the management and preservation of fish stocks and species in general.