Indigenous knowledge in the beach seine fisheries in Sri Lanka: An indispensable factor in community-based fisheries management

Small-scale fishing over the globe is based primarily on fisher indigenous knowledge (IK), accumulated through many generations of close interactions between people and the natural world. Community-based beach seine fisher communities of southern Sri Lanka were studied through standard ethnographic methods to ascertain the traditional method in using fishers’ IK, and explore empirically the accuracy in using those methods distilled from the traditional fishers. Study revealed that, inter alia, traditional fishers use IK to predict the commencement of fishing season, and identify and quantify the species composition occurring at their fishing territory. Ten traditional methods those which are important for identifying and quantifying the fish school were distilled. Explored methods frequently used by traditional fishers were based on the changes of seawater color (folk oceanography) and the behaviour of sea terns (Sterna sp.). Traditional fishers’ responses on frequency of utility of explored methods in day-to-day fishing activities were in accordance with the findings of the empirical study. Moreover, principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that PC score loading in fishers’ expectation and fishers’ realization had a positive significant relationship (r=0.814, p<0.001). This indicated that traditional fishers’ expectation on composition and quantity of fish school arriving at fishing territory (ex-ante) is accurate and reliable at the realization (ex-post). As such, there exist opportunities to fisheries co-management for the coastal fisheries in Sri Lanka, incorporating fishers’ indigenous knowledge in resource exploitation.

[1]  R.A.D.B. Samarayanke.  Review of national fisheries situation in Sri Lanka , 2003 .

[2]  C. Roberts,et al.  Using fishers' anecdotes, naturalists' observations and grey literature to reassess marine species at risk: the case of the Gulf grouper in the Gulf of California, Mexico , 2005 .

[3]  Matthias Wolff,et al.  Using Traditional Ecological Knowledge to Improve Holistic Fisheries Management: Transdisciplinary Modeling of a Lagoon Ecosystem of Southern Mexico , 2013 .

[4]  M. Freeman,et al.  Ignore fishers’ knowledge and miss the boat , 2000 .

[5]  B. Russell,et al.  The Marine Fishery Resources of Sri Lanka , 1995 .

[6]  Fikret Berkes,et al.  Two to tango: The role of government in fisheries co-management , 1997 .

[7]  R. E. Johannes,et al.  The case for data-less marine resource management: examples from tropical nearshore finfisheries. , 1998, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[8]  Joshua Adam Drew,et al.  Use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Marine Conservation , 2005 .

[9]  R. Silvano,et al.  Beyond fishermen’s tales: contributions of fishers’ local ecological knowledge to fish ecology and fisheries management , 2008 .

[10]  P. Biernacki,et al.  Snowball Sampling: Problems and Techniques of Chain Referral Sampling , 1981 .

[11]  Y. Kato.  Appropriate management for small-scale tropical fisheries , 2012 .

[12]  N. Hanazaki,et al.  Do traditional fishers recognise reef fish species declines? Shifting environmental baselines in Eastern Brazil , 2013 .

[13]  S. Caillon,et al.  Community based management of near-shore fisheries in Vanuatu : what works ? , 2013 .

[14]  J. R. Nielsen,et al.  Fisheries co-management: a comparative analysis☆ , 1996 .

[15]  Henry P. Huntington,et al.  Observations on the Utility of the Semi-directive Interview for Documenting Traditional Ecological Knowledge , 1998 .

[16]  K. Ruddle,et al.  Traditional community-based coastal marine fisheries management in Viet Nam , 1998 .

[17]  T. Pitcher,et al.  Towards sustainability in world fisheries , 2002, Nature.

[18]  Sea Tenure in Southern Sri Lanka , 1977 .

[19]  C. Briggs.  Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research , 1986 .

[20]  John Wagner,et al.  Who Knows? On the Importance of Identifying “Experts” When Researching Local Ecological Knowledge , 2003 .

[21]  S. Turvey,et al.  Rapidly Shifting Baselines in Yangtze Fishing Communities and Local Memory of Extinct Species , 2010, Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.

[22]  Rupak Chakravarty,et al.  Preserving traditional knowledge: Initiatives in India , 2010 .

[23]  Upali Sarath Amarasinghe,et al.  A Fishery Associated with Floating Objects in the Indian Ocean off Southern Sri Lanka , 2012 .

[24]  J. R. Nielsen,et al.  Fisheries co-management policy brief: findings from a worldwide study , 2003 .

[25]  F. Berkes,et al.  Fisher knowledge as expert system : A case from the longline fishery of Grenada, the Eastern Caribbean , 2007 .

[26]  C. Folke,et al.  REDISCOVERY OF TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AS ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT , 2000 .