Sea cucumber management strategies: challenges and opportunities in a developing country context

Abstract

SummarySea cucumbers play a critical role in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems. Sea cucumbers are also a key source of income for millions of small-scale fishers worldwide. The lucrative nature of this industry has led to severe reductions in sea cucumber populations in numerous regions globally. A large proportion of sea cucumber fisheries are located in developing countries, which present unique challenges to management, including addressing highly decentralized methods of extraction and processing, limited economic and technological resources for governance and, in many cases, a high dependency on sea cucumbers as a primary source of income for small-scale coastal fishers. In this review, we review the benefits and challenges of seven categories of sea cucumber management strategies used globally in developing countries, including gear restrictions, size and weight limits, effort and catch controls, temporal closures, area closures, value chain licensing and territorial use rights in fisheries. We conclude that sea cucumber management in developing countries could benefit from focusing regulatory solutions on narrowed parts of the value chain, coupling production-based management strategies with processing and export regulations and providing avenues for local fishers to inform policy at the local, regional and national levels.