Management Units: Challenges To Promote Understanding And Conservation Of Marine Turtles In Oceanic Areas

This document presents a discussion and some recommendations with regards to appropriate management units to promote the conservation of marine turtles in oceanic areas used by tuna longline fisheries under ICCAT. We comment on the utility of using Regional Management Units (RMUs) for marine turtles as proposed by Wallace et al. (2010). Per Wallace (2010 et al), RMUs refer to geographically explicit population segments, based on biogeographical data (e.g. nesting sites, genetics, telemetry) that can be applied to regionally appropriate management issues. RMUs are not intended to represent complete geographic distributions of species on global or regional scales, but rather distributions that are anchored to landmasses by known nesting site(s) and/or genetic stock origins and defined by biogeographical information. While RMUs are important to contribute to our understanding of key aspects of marine turtle populations, this analysis indicates that marine turtle RMUs do not cover all requirements to define management units to the ICCAT fisheries. Considering that the longline fishing are compose of different kind of fisheries, using distinct fishery strategies and operate in distinct at-sea regions, these fisheries interact with marine turtle mixed stocks in foraging and developmental areas. We recommend ICCAT adopt the “Fishery”as the principal concept to define Management Unit (rather than sea turtle RMUs) in order to understand and reduce marine turtle interactions in the ICCAT fisheries.