A new University of Alaska Fairbanks study says halibut charter operators are changing fishing locations because of increasing fuel prices and new regulations.
The study, published in June in the journal PLOS One, was done by Doctoral student Maggie Chan and professor Anne Beaudreau in the UAF College of fisheries and Ocean Sciences.
In an effort to better understand how external factors influence fishing behavior and opportunities, they looked at how charter fishing locations outside of Homer and Sitka have changed since the 1990s. Interviews were conducted with charter fishermen in Homer and Sitka to learn where, what and how they fish has changed over time. Participating charter operators were given a map for every decade in which they had fished and asked to identify general areas they used.
“Our main goal was to identify any big shifts in where fishermen were going,” Chan said. What they found was that an individual’s motivations for changing locations we often intertwined with fishing regulations and socioeconomic variables that were outside of their control.
Since the early 1990s, charter fishermen in Homer have consistently traveled about 0 times farther to fish than Sitka fishermen, the researchers said. This was in part because traveling farther allowed them to also target salmon, rockfish and lingcod.
Still, when fuel prices rose in the early 2000s, some charter fishermen began fishing closer to home.
Sitka fishermen, in turn, changed their harvesting locations primarily because of a new regulation. N 1999, a Local Area Management Plan eliminated charter and commercial fishing in Sitka Sound during summer months. This forced charter fishermen to travel 25 miles or more to catch halibut, even though population numbers in the sound were high, the study showed.
Chan said their results suggest managers should consider a more holistic approach, such as multispecies regulations, rather than regulating individual species. Single species management limits the ability to consider how changes for one species might affect other species or habitats, she said.
Multispecies or ecosystem-based management would better evaluate the full context of a new regulation, which may better account for how charter fishermen are likely to adapt to local change, she said.
