Workshop Topics

ISSF Skippers Workshops enable tuna skippers, fishing masters, and captains to exchange knowledge with fisheries scientists and researchers about best practices in sustainable fishing.

To determine the best ways to avoid bycatch and minimize tuna fishing’s impacts on the marine ecosystem, fishers’ empirical knowledge is as valuable as marine scientists’ knowledge.

In our collaborative workshops, vessel crew can provide direct feedback on scientists’ bycatch-reduction recommendations. Fishers also can offer their own mitigation insights and techniques, including sharing their prototypes for shark and manta-ray release ramps and non-entangling biodegradable FADs.

Our ISSF Skippers Workshops Round 9 report documents fisher ideas and feedback from our most recent workshops.

Best Practices for Sustainable Fishing

ISSF’s skippers workshops have focused on sharing information to meet these goals for more sustainable tuna fishing:

Avoiding or reducing bycatch in tuna fishing operations, through new technologies or practices
Learning best safe handling and release approaches for sharks, turtles, manta rays, and other “non-target” species incidentally caught
Using non-entangling and biodegradable FADs to reduce shark and turtle bycatch and mitigate the impact of FAD beaching events
Researching ways to prevent the capture of both undesired species and unwanted sizes of tuna (including through acoustic discrimination of tuna species and sizes before the net is set)
Identifying fleet fishing strategies and their effects on target tunas and ecosystems

Workshops also can be customized for specific fleet needs.

Vessel & Tuna Company Partners

ISSF reports have explored the benefits of fisher-scientist interactions at workshops and onboard purse seines. These tuna vessels and organizations, for example, partnered with ISSF on at-sea bycatch-reduction research projects in 2011-2017: