Fishing behaviours and fisher effect in decision‐making processes when facing depredation by marine predators

Abstract

Fishers are decisionmakers who have a top predatorlike foraging behaviour when searching and exploiting patchily distributed fish resources (Bertrand et al., 2007; Bez et al., 2011; Planque et al., 2011). Decisionmaking processes may be driven by both external factors (e.g. resource availability, environmental conditions, economic circumstances, fishing regulations and presence of other predators) and internal factors (e.g. fishers’ skills/personality and characteristics of boats – Holley & Marchal, 2004; Marchal et al., 2006; Simpson et al., 2011). To model these human behaviours, ecologists have used optimal foraging theory (OFT) to inform the decisionmaking process as regards alternatives for optimising cost– benefit ratios (Aswani, 1998; Begossi, 1992; McCay, 1981). Decisions made by fishers, in Received: 14 May 2020 | Revised: 26 April 2021 | Accepted: 24 May 2021 DOI: 10.1111/fme.12503