I should have put this above but the estimated bycatch is 1-4% of the potential biological removal and marine mammal populations are recovering.

As a result, she mapped bycatch risk to identify areas of high risk that disproportionately contribute to bycatch. These were areas of relatively low fishery importance, suggesting that temporary closures could curb bycatch risk with small fishery impacts, should managing bycatch become necessary

Are there other management levers we can pull to find more efficient solutions? Yutian used random forest models to explore the drivers of bycatch risk and found that regulating spatial-temporal dynamics of the fishery could have more impact than regulating things like mesh size and soak time (4/X).

However, this progress has been made through management-induced reductions in fishing effort, which have had huge impacts on particaption and revenues. See below (3/X).

First, she combined observer and logbook data to estimate bycatch of six species over time. Bycatch, high and unsustainable in the 1980s and 1990s, has fallen precipitously.