Observations of Industrial Shallow-Water Prawn Trawling in Kenya

Ungwana Bay, located along the north coast of Kenya (Figures 1 and 2), began in the 1970s after exploratory fishing surveys identified the existence of fishable penaeid prawn stocks (Iversen, 1984). Small-scale fishers were also targeting the prawn resources in the bay. As trawlers fishing close to the shore destroyed nearshore habitats and the gear of small-scale fishers, resource-use conflicts arose between the trawler companies and small-scale fishers. To reduce these conflicts, in 1991, Kenya Fisheries Act Chapter 378 limited prawn trawling to beyond 5 NM from shore, with no industrial trawling allowed within a 0–3 NM zone. In 2010, a Prawn Fishery Management Plan recommended that trawling vessels carry a fisheries observer. However, it was not until this became a requirement in Article 147 of the 2016 Fisheries Management and Development Act that Kenya Fisheries Service (KeFS) observers began to work aboard trawlers; this article also expanded the observer program to cover all other commercial fishing operations such as longliners, purse seiners, and deepwater trawlers. The observer program provides data and information on fish catches and their composition, on the fate of target and non-target species, and on the fishing effort to enable evaluation of the status of the fishery and to inform reviews of the regulations in management plans. In this study, we analyzed the species composition of retained and discarded catches from 2016 to 2019 (using data collected by observers) and trawl catches between 2011 and 2019 (with fishing vessel log data provided by the trawl industry). The first KeFS-trained scientific observers were deployed in 2016 on four Kenyan-flagged industrial trawlers licensed to fish in the Malindi-Ungwana Bay during the prawn fishing season. They observed and recorded operations between April 1 and October 31 every year from 2016 to 2019 (Figure 1) aboard trawlers that were fitted with double rigged nets of 55–60 mm and 40–45 mm at the funnel and cod ends, respectively. Thirty-seven observer trips were executed for 168 days between 2016 and 2019 and recorded 1,371 out of 8,531 hauls. The catch composition data collected by