The interaction between the tune fishing operation and sea turtles issue in Viet Nam

Abstract

Principally, the fisheries sector has developed greatly and taken more important role in Viet Nam. However, a number of turtles have incident been killed during fishing activities. The purposes of this paper is primary assement on the interaction and options of reducing sea turtle mortality in tuna fishing and other operation. Some prevailing methodologies have been used to gather information concerned, such as : annually scientific reports on national fisheries resource management, field observer's survey, questionnaires and logbook collections...The sea turtle and tuna research program has being implemented in collecting of data of species composition, regional and seasonal distribution in Vietnamese seawaters. There has been identified 10 tuna species, which landing of the annually total yield of 30-40 thousands tones. The favour tuna species are catching by purse seiner, longline. The valuable tuna and other-like those targeting tuna species, which have a distribution that overlaps in the migration routes and feeding grounds of 5 turtle species. There is some provincial information involved to sea turtles as accidental catchments and caused killing sea turtles by J-hook style that almost tuna fishing boats have being used.This paper is also discussed the ration of other kind of fishing gears, use of new kinds of hook as circle hook and smarter fishing which can help to prevent sea turtles mortality from by-catch. The current interest of Viet Nam, through the Ministry of Fisheries (MoFI), is promoting the suitable exploitation, especially, tuna resource and sustainable conservation of sea turtle resources.