Reducing Chinook Salmon Bycatch with Market-Based Incentives : Individual Tradable Encounter Credits

Despite popular appeal, managing fishery bycatch with restrictive hardcaps is a strategy that can produce unexpected negative outcomes (such as the race for turtle bycatch seen in the Hawaiian swordfish fleet in 2006). This is particularly true when the prohibited species catch exhibits wide variation in numbers from year to year as with Chinook salmon bycatch in the Bearing Sea Pollock fishery. In this case, the fundamental weakness of a restrictive hard cap is that it protects Chinook populations exactly when they need it least (when they are most abundant) and offers no protection when Chinook populations are most vulnerable (when they are least abundant, and encounters are low). Though intuitively appealing, such simple measures can actually harm Chinook salmon populations by encouraging more careless fishing exactly when encounter rates should be lowest (provoking a higher overall bycatch rate than would occur otherwise). Simple hardcaps and plans based on semi-fixed performance standards (e.g. a bycatch target of 47,591 with a fixed hardcap of 68,392) punish the Pollock industry most severely when Chinook need least protection and offer no penalty when salmon are rare 1 . These simplistic management strategies are well intentioned but ultimately destructive to industry profitability and Chinook conservation.