Fishing operations to catch tuna on aggregated schools at the vicinity of a data buoy in the Western Equatorial Atlantic

摘要

The overfishing of the spiny lobster (Panulirus spp.) in Brazil caused by high fishing effort level and use of predatory illegal gears has called for new alternatives to make up for their dwindling stocks. One of those has been the development of a fishery carried out by a small wooden fleet based at Areia Branca, RN, Northeast Brazil, targeting tunas and tuna-like species in the vicinity of data buoys from the Pilot Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic Program (PIRATA), which happen to act unintentionally as Fishing Aggregating Device (FAD) (Silva et al., 2016)