CONFERENCE | Coral reef fisheries are vital for poverty reduction and economic development in Kenya, supporting over 1.5 million people. Despite increasing efforts, reef fish landings have plateaued, facing a critical threat from excessive and destructive fishing, leading to local extinctions. Overfishing in Kenya has reached a critical level, necessitating understanding species' resilience or susceptibility to extinction. However, assessing extinctions in data-poor regions like Kenya is challenging, and current species-at-risk assessments often overlook valuable local knowledge. This study pioneers the integration of anecdotal information from fishers to corroborate local extinctions, addressing gaps in data reliability. It explores fishers' perceptions of shifting baselines for 23 identified at-risk species. Our findings revealed that a majority of fishermen perceived decline and rarity in more than half of the species identified as potentially threatened with local extinction by the Buckley et al. (2019) framework, suggesting that the reported results are likely to reflect genuine ecological patterns, rather than local attitudes about the general state of fisheries. We also found that most old fishers reported declining populations and sizes of reef fishes threatened with local extinction compared to intermediate and young fishers. These findings suggest that fishers in Kenya might be experiencing the Shifting Baselines Syndrome, a phenomenon where current population levels of species are considered the norm because knowledge of past abundance has been lost. Our findings also show that using the local ecological knowledge (LEK) approach can provide reliable information on fish threat status.
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