Fisheries & Aquaculture

In recent years, additional but potentially harmful fishing gears have penetrated into the artisanal fisheries in Kenya, posing great management challenges. The continued use of spears in fishing, despite their discouraged use due to perceived environmental and societal negative impact, has raised a lot of concern and debate in the Kenyan artisanal marine and coastal fisheries sub-sector. The impacts of spearfishing in terms of catch composition, diversity and size-frequency in Vanga and Msambweni, South Coast of Kenya were obtained in this study. Both in Vanga and Msambweni spearfishing is highly done especially by young fishermen during low tides. Two months data collection (October and December) in 2012 on fish catch composition reveals significant differences between fish captured by spear gun and other most used gears in both sites. The difference in fish composition was attributed to more abundant families and species captured by spear gun compared to Malema, Hook and line and Gillnet. Diversity by species richness for fish was significantly higher under the usage of a spear gun. In addition, significant higher Shannon-Wiener diversity index lower dominance was observed for the fish captured by the spear gun than for those captured by the other gears. The size distribution of fish captured by spear gun was large; all sizes all fish were captured by the spear gun regardless of the species (11 cm to 30 cm). The impact of spear fishing resulted in higher abundance of Lutjanus fulviflamma in Vanga and Octopus macropus in Msambweni.