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 a decline in populations (2 = 35.63, df = 6, p = 3.25e-06) and sizes (2 = 40.586, df = 12, p = 5.745e-05) of reef fishes threatened with local extinction than intermediate and young fishers. These findings suggest that fishers in Kenya might be
experiencing the Shifting Baselines Syndrome. In this phenomenon, current population levels of species are considered the norm because knowledge of past abundance has been lost.
Keywords: perceptions, overexploitation, rarity, socio-demographic
Manuscript submitted to Marine Policy | This (publication) was made possible (in part) by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York (Grant number u05185272). The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Future Africa Research Leader Fellowship (FAR-LeaF) Programme at the University of Pretoria. Additional
funding for this project was obtained from the Flemish Inter-University Council (VLIR-UOS) for the SAVE-FISH (project code: VLIR402 KE2022TEA517A105).
Comments