Engaging Fishermen Community in conservation of endangered species by rewarding the releasing effort

Catches non-target organisms or in other words ‘bycatch’—an issue of critical ocean conservation and resource management concerns. numerous strategies exist to prevent bycatch. These were adopted by regional fisheries management bodies and by the countries on individual basis. However, the data have been lacking on the global scale of this issue in order to evaluate and to mitigate the impact. Releasing of bycatches is rarely practiced and reported by the fishermen. However, encouraging and acquiring the support of fishing community is important in the implementation process of this types of measures. In this concerns Sri Lanka adopted a simple yet successful methods to encourage skippers and crew members on releasing sharks, turtles and marine mammals and reporting the same. Here skippers are required to record a video via the electronic log tablets or smartphones on live releasing of above species and to provide the same to DFAR soon after they landed. As a reward DFAR provides a specially designed T-shirt to the skipper and crew members. Responses from the fishermen are positive and accordingly 222 number of videos received to DFAR by Skippers for the year 2022.