Doctoral student Melissa Cronin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the Grand Prize winner in ISSF’s International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) Seafood Sustainability Contest.
She receives a $45,000 prize from ISSF for her contest entry, Incentivizing Collaborative Release to Reduce Elasmobranch Bycatch Mortality, which proposes handling-and-release methods that purse-seine vessel skippers and crew can use to reduce the mortality of manta rays and devil rays incidentally caught during tuna fishing.
Her proposal examines the options of co-operative workshops with purse seine skippers and observers, offering financial rewards for the design, testing, and onboard implementation of feasible, scalable techniques for safely removing rays from vessel decks.
It also includes training observers in tagging rays to track their post-release survival. Rays, in addition to sharks, are the species groups most vulnerable in the purse-seine fishery. In the Indian Ocean rays comprise the majority of by-catch in free-school tuna sets, and by-catch overall on such sets represents 0.9% of the total catch, 34% of which is rays.
In addition to the $40,000 Grand Prize, the award includes a trip to a tuna event. ISSF will arrange for Melissa Cronin to present her proposal at a Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) event this year.
“Through this competition, we’re pleased to reward promising research ideas from up-and-coming marine and fisheries scientists,” commented Dr. Victor Restrepo, ISSF Vice President, Science and Chair of the ISSF Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), who headed the contest’s judging panel.
“The thoughtful proposal is based on collaborative problem-solving between fishers and scientists – a successful model ISSF follows in our Skippers Workshops worldwide. Our workshops have focused on finding new approaches in tuna fisheries to protect sharks and other non-tuna species, for example.”
The judging panel evaluated contest entries on the basis of originality, conservation impact, impact on skipjack catches, degree to which idea has been tested, feasibility of industry-wide implementation, and cost effectiveness.
In addition to Dr. Restrepo, the panel included Dr. Josu Santiago of AZTI-Tecnalia, Dr. Laurent Dagorn of Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), ISSF science consultant Dr. Gala Moreno, and OPAGAC scientific officer Miguel Herrera.
Guillermo Ortuno Crespo, a researcher at the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke University, receives a $10,000 prize as the contest Runner-up Winner for his proposal, Dynamic Habitat Predictions of Two Bycaught Oceanic Shark Species. His proposal focuses on predicting the dynamic, spatial distribution of non-target and sometimes target species based on their environmental preferences.
This study explores the dynamic habitats of Carcharhinus longimanus and C. falciformis in the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) region, to help predict where fisheries-shark by-catch interactions are likely to occur.
The ISSF Seafood Sustainability Contest commemorated ISSF’s first Decade of Discovery (2009-2019), which has been marked by productive partnerships with marine scientists, seafood companies, vessels, Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs), charitable foundations, retailers, and fellow NGOs.
