bycatch
Sign in to savealt=Shark entangled in a net on board a fishing vessel|thumb|A finetooth shark (Carcharhinus isodon) caught as bycatch by a fishing vessel Bycatch (or by-catch), in the fishing industry, is a fish or other marine species that is caught unintentionally while fishing for specific species or sizes of wildlife. Bycatch is either the wrong species, the wrong sex, or is undersized or juveniles of the target species. The term "bycatch" is also sometimes used for untargeted catch in other forms of animal harvesting or collecting. Non-marine species (freshwater fish not saltwater fish) that are caught
Article
23 sectionsContents
- Activities that produce bycatch
- Commercial fishing
- Recreational fishing
- Shrimp trawling
- Non-fisheries bycatch
- Victims
- Sharks and rays
- Cetacean
- Albatross
- Sea turtles
- Mitigation
- Bycatch reduction devices
- Turtle excluder devices
- Conservation engineering of trawl nets
- Seabirds
- Retention
- Commercialization of bycatch
- No discards policy
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
alt=Shark entangled in a net on board a fishing vessel|thumb|A finetooth shark (Carcharhinus isodon) caught as bycatch by a fishing vessel Bycatch (or by-catch), in the fishing industry, is a fish or other marine species that is caught unintentionally while fishing for specific species or sizes of wildlife. Bycatch is either the wrong species, the wrong sex, or is undersized or juveniles of the target species. The term "bycatch" is also sometimes used for untargeted catch in other forms of animal harvesting or collecting. Non-marine species (freshwater fish not saltwater fish) that are caught (either intentionally or unintentionally) but regarded as generally "undesirable" are referred to as rough fish (mainly US) or coarse fish (mainly UK).
In 1997, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defined bycatch as "total fishing mortality, excluding that accounted directly by the retained catch of target species". Bycatch contributes to fishery decline and is a mechanism of overfishing for unintentional catch.