Modelling the learning behaviour of fishers: learning more from their successes than from their failures

摘要

Learning occurs in all stages of a fishery, in the entire fishing career of a fisher, and even within a single fishing trip. It is an important aspect of fleet dynamics; failure to take it into proper account biases results of population dynamics studies and results of stock assessments. In this paper, I introduce and slightly generalise three learning models and derive a new one. I use them to analyse data on the short-term learning behaviour of all fishers as a group in the fishery of the western king prawn Penaeus latisulcatus in the Gulf St Vincent, Australia, to demonstrate their utilities. The damped periodic change inferred in fishing efficiency of all fishers as a group with time (shot number) over a fishing day in the P. latisulcatus fishery had a period of 9.44 +/- 1.06 shots and could have resulted from periodic 'forgetting' and forcing by good catch rates. The new learning model was used to test the hypothesis that fishers in the P. latisulcatus fishery learn more from their failures in catch rate than from their successes, or more from their successes than from their failures, or as much from their successes as from their failures. Although very limited, the data suggest that fishers as a group learn 69.03 +/- 311.52% more from their successes in good catch rates than from their failures. Crown Copyright (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. [References: 15]