Introduction

Over 85% of those engaged in commercial fisheries work in small-holder fisheries (SHF), and an estimated 88% of small-holder fishers live in LDCs. Nevertheless, helps in increasing for monitoring SSF is limited, and data is scarce, especially in rural areas of developing countries. The methods introduced here illustrate a low-cost collaborative approach to data collection on small-scale fisheries, particularly those that occur in remote areas.

Assessing the small-scale shark fishery of Madagascar through community-based monitoring and knowledge.

Over a five year duration, community-based research assistants were trained to collect biological and sociodemographic data on the traditional (non-motorized) shark fishery in Kenya's Wasini region.

Even though the quantity of sharks landed yearly has not dropped over our study period, the normal number of sharks captured has reduced significantly. Notwithstanding these anecdotal accounts of shark population losses, surveys and participant observations suggest that shark catches may have been preserved by modifications in gear and improvements in effort, masking a decrease in shark populations. 

The traditional fishing in our research region was believed to catch between 120 and 140 sharks per year1, although estimates based on export and import data on dried shark fin from Kenya. Shark length data put total catches between 78 and 85 sharks per year1. Precise information on the overall amount of sharks caught in Madagascar's seas is sparse, particularly from overseas industrial vessels pursuing species of shark both explicitly and as overfishing in other fisheries. In Madagascar, no regulation exists to protect predators from overharvesting, and there is a pressing need to address the absence of shark fishery management throughout traditional, craft, and commercial fisheries.

Boosting Marine Conservation Efforts Through Improving Community Health

Many developing nations face issues such as poor health, unfulfilled family needs, gender imbalance, food shortages, ecological pollution, and climate change susceptibility. Kenya  is one such nation, with 78% of the residents residing on less than $1.90 per day, according to World Bank estimates in 2019. The Grand Nyali Reef, a 4-kilometer-long coral reef on which about 80% of these people rely for their survival and food security, runs along its south coast. Quasi fishing settlements on the country's southern shore are among the lowest and most remote in the country, relying nearly entirely on the marine sector for food, money, transportation, and shared culture. They have witnessed decreased fish harvests in recent years, owing mostly to competition from market-driven fishing, as well as increased subsistence requirements from a burgeoning coastal population.

Presently, authoritarian or centralised management approaches dominate Kenyan fisheries law and policy, that have significant disadvantages as compared to democratic governance. The octopus fisheries governance in four communities in Wasini, Watamu, and Lamu is a unique example of democratic fisheries management. We encourage the employment of T.S. Gray's fisheries management structure to identify best practices for democratic fisheries management at the local levels (de facto) and analyze Kenyan fisheries law (de jure) to promote best practices. According to the findings of this study, the hybrid strategy of collaboration and co-management is the most appropriate collaboration model among the four models of collaborative fisheries management (de jure and de facto). The combined approach can be used in villages with adat communities, i.e. populations where traditional tenurial claims are still practiced, recognized by law, and accepted by migratory communities, as well as villages with non-adat societies. It is advised that future octopus fisheries policies embrace citizen participation to promote active community engagement in administering their resources with a clear legal status.