Fleet Dynamics and Individual Variation: Why Some People Catch More Fish than Others

Most fisheries problems arise from a failure to understand and manage fishermen, and that the study of fishermen should be a major part of fisheries research. The dynamic behavior of fishing fleets can be broken into four components: investment, movement, catching power, and discarding. The literature in each area is reviewed and the needed research described. The second part of this paper examines the causes and consequences of individual variation in catch in a commercial purse seine fishery and a recreational hook and line fishery. It is shown that the catch is highly concentrated in the recreational fishery with a small proportion of frequent anglers catching a large portion of the fish. Catch is more equitably distributed in the purse seine fishery. The consequence of individual variation includes the observation that small annual bag limits in the sport fishery could reduce the total catch significantly while leaving most anglers unaffected and the fact that buy back of the most successful vessels would reduce the commercial catch by relatively little.