Empowering Fishing Communities in the MAR Reef

As part of MAR Fund’s webinar series, where partners are invited to present results, lessons learnt, experiences and share information regarding projects they have developed, the Comunidad y Biodiversidad, A. C. (COBI) presented their work on the use of hydrophones.

This webinar was carried out on October 19th, 2023 with the participation of 45 people and the goal was for COBI to present the use of hydrophones to monitor fish spawning aggregations and share results of research conducted in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve and Arrecifes de Xcalak National Park, Mexico.

Many commercial fish species migrate long distances to spawn at specific times and locations each year. In the Mesoamerican Reef System (MAR), 37 species are known to form fish spawning aggregations, including the commercially important and heavily exploited species of groupers and snappers. These predators are key to the health of the marine ecosystem. However, monitoring them can be expensive and difficult to implement in the field.

Nevertheless, the application of passive acoustic monitoring of fish reproductive aggregations reduces fieldwork costs and the risk associated with deep sea diving, while allowing to detect the presence of these species and determining whether a site is an active aggregation or not.

In this webinar, COBI and fishing cooperatives shared the experience of using hydrophones as a tool for acoustic monitoring. Likewise, results obtained from five years of research in the Mexican Caribbean were presented.
 
We continue to work with partners and using tools that will provide the information required to better understand key species.

If you are interested on viewing the webinar, you can find the recording here: https://marfund.org/en/mar-fund-events/#RecordingTheUseOfHydrophones

We will keep you posted on any other community fisheries topic presented in MAR Fund’s Webinar Series.

The MAR Fund Team.