Social media is an effective data-collection tool when studying the activities of recreational fisheries, reducing the limitations of cost and timeliness associated with traditional research methods, according to a new study.
University of Hawai’i at Hilo Adjunct Associate Professor and Hawai'i Cooperative Fishery Research Unit Leader Tim Grabowski was the lead author of the paper, which was published in March 2023 in Aquatic Biology.
The study, “Pandemic-driven changes in the nearshore non-commercial fishery in Hawai’i: catch photos posted to social media capture changes in fisher behavior,” found that studying Instagram pictures posted by noncommercial and non-charter recreational fishers, followed with oral histories directly from fishers to validate social media findings, allowed researchers to efficiently detect changing coastal conditions.
Thanks to higher rates of social media posts with more fish pictured per post during the Covid-19 pandemic, the research team discovered that Hawai’i near-shore recreational fisheries experienced shifts from coastal pelagic fish species to reef fish and spent greater time periods fishing than prior to the pandemic.
“I think that social media has a lot of potential as an early warning system … that can detect changes potentially earlier than on-the-ground surveys that just take more effort and more time, making it harder to pull out those patterns that, in retrospect, become obvious because the Instagram data is much more simplified,” Grabowski said.
The researchers discovered a shift in recreational catch away from pelagic species of yellowfin tuna (ahi), mahi, and wahoo (ono) toward coastal species such as giant trevally (ulua aukea), bluefin trevally (‘omilu), and reef fish. Factors attributed to the shift may be increased targeting of fish for consumption – not just for sport – and the cost of fuel and travel during the pandemic that forced fishers to catch closer to the shoreline, according to Grabowski.
Fishing effort also increased in part due to fewer working hours, increased food insecurity, lower rates of commercial fishing, and a less prohibitive entry to Hawai’i fishing due to easy shoreline access and low cost of fishing gear during the pandemic, according to the study.
Grabowski said social media provides a tool to monitor fishing pressure on stocks in near-shore or recreational fisheries that can fluctuate over time due to economic, social, and food security disruptions, as occurred during the pandemic. The use of social media allows researchers and fisheries managers to analyze a broad view of current harvest estimates and changing conditions in the fisheries faster than traditional data collection would have allowed. That can be especially important in times of socioeconomic disruption that changes typically fishing patterns, and in areas like in Hawai’i, where there are no fishing licenses for residents and plenty of coastline.
“I think this paper demonstrates it’s possible to say something about the everyday fishing behavior of noncommercial fishing using social media and to get something that at least paints a pretty good picture to what traditional data collection methods can tell us for commercial fisheries,” Grabowski said.
Social media also introduces a faster and cheaper way to collect data as a way to identify and prevent problems before they worsen, according to Grabowski. It’s a less-intrusive data collection method than trying to talk to fishers in the recreational industry, who often don’t want research biologists or state agency representatives bothering them.
“The two approaches were better together than by themselves. Combining a more traditional creel survey, or talking to fishers approach, with the social media, kind of provides a more comprehensive view than either could by themselves. The gaps that one method left in that story were kind of really filled in nicely by the other,” Grabowski said.
There are disadvantages to social media as a research tool, though, the study states, such as assumptions one can mistakenly glean from a single Instagram post. For example, one might assume pictures posted represent the entirety of a recreational fisher’s effort for one day. According to Grabowski, one of the biggest issues is that people don’t post photos of fish they don’t catch, and therefore, if attempting to measure effort, the researcher would be overestimating the actual catch per time spent on the water.
“There are really two big assumptions that we had to make with the data, and that is recognizing that it’s not a complete picture of the fishing effort that's going on and having to assume that when people are taking pictures of their catch, they’re showing us everything that they caught,” Grabowski said.
The idea to use social media as a research tool stemmed from a different research study focused on a rare fish that only appeared in recreational catches. Researchers noted fishers from that study were posting catches on Instagram, and the lab prepared to conduct social media studies when the pandemic broke out, as interns could not go into the field to collect information.
The Instagram posts used in the paper were publicly available, geo-referenced to Hawai’i Island, included a “#fishing” hashtag, and were non-charter, recreational fishing activities. Posts ranged in date from 1 January, 2016, to 5 July, 2021, and the fish pictured underwent identification to the lowest taxonomic unit.
This was not the first time researchers have used social media as an effective tool for garnering useful fishing information.
A different paper published in 2022 by the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies examined the social media app Facebook to determine unaccounted for southern flounder harvest estimates by the recreational fishing industry in Texas. According to the paper, Facebook posts by guided nighttime gigging charters, which includes fishing with a multipronged spear, had the capacity to exert extreme pressure on Texas’s declining flounder population and went unaccounted for in traditional fisheries management research processes.
The institute studied only legal fishing days from 2017 to 2019 of the southern flounder fishing seasons. Each photo, the research team assumed, represented one trip, and similar to the Hawai’i study, the fish underwent counting and identification to the lowest taxonomic level. As a result, the research suggested continuously declining stocks may be due to guided gigging charters exerting heavy, year-round pressure on Texas flounder that went unaccounted for by commercial and governmental management.
There have not been any published studies on the topic of commercial fishing that incorporate the study of social media posting, but Grabowski said it’s a potentially fertile ground for further research.
“[Fishing] offers a really challenging environment for data collection. If we can find a tool that makes that even just a little bit easier, that has potential for increasing capacity to do better management,” he said.
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