The Effectiveness of the Jones/Davis Type By-Catch Reduction Device (BRD) to reduce unintended catch of trawl fisheries

Reduction by-catch of commercial fishing is become a major concern, especially prawn trawlfisheries. By-catch reduction device developed to address that issue. However, there were trade-offproblems regarding the implementation the BRD in trawl fisheries that is the effectiveness of the BRD. Theperformance of BRD was questionable on the effectiveness in term of reduction the by-catch andmaintenance amount of target catch. This essay examines the performance of Jones-Davis type BRD toreduce by-catch and its impact on prawn catch in Cleveland Bay. An experimental fishing has beenconducted (control-net and BRD-net; Pair-trawl method) to assess the effectiveness of by-catch reductionwhich examined with Wilcoxon Rank Test. The result shows that trawl equipped by BRD significantlyreduce by-catch by 22.2% (Z = -4.6406, p-value = 0.0001) and retained prawn catch which was nosignificant difference in prawn catch between BRD and control nets (Z = -1.9218, p-value = 0.0546).Therefore, that evidence could be argued to convince about the BRD benefits to commercial prawn trawlfisheries