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174 V. Maccarrone et al. / Turk. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 14: 173-181 (2014)

Archipelagos is a very important tourist destination, the use of a pinger (AP);
and the largest catch and sales of fish products occur  the Return of Investment (ROI) for pinger
during this season. Therefore, to mitigate the
interactions between cetaceans and fishing equipment, equipment, including the economic incentive
the use of acoustic devices (pingers) could be provided by the European Fisheries Fund (EFF,
important for the Archipelago’s fisheries. In 2006, a 2006);
study demonstrated that the use of a pinger affects the
fish catch efficiency and damages bottom gill nets  the Economic Damage (ED) due to the
associated with bottlenose dolphins (Buscaino et al., depredation of dolphins on the seven target species;
2009). and

In this paper, based on the results of the study the ED due to destruction of the net.
cited above, we propose an economic evaluation of
the pinger efficiency and the depredation Materials and Methods
phenomenon. In particular, we used fishing data
(biomass of each species caught) and damage to nets Study Area
to evaluate the following:
The data used in this study was obtained in the
 the gross Profit Per Unit Effort (PPUE) period from March to May 2006 in the waters off the
 the production trend of a net equipped with a Egadi Archipelago (Favignana Island; western Sicily;
pinger (pinger net) compared to a net without a pinger 37°57'00'' N,12°19'00'' E) (Buscaino et al., 2009). The
(control net); waters surrounding the islands are part of a Marine
 the Advantage of Production associated with Protected Area (Figure 1). The sea bottoms are
characterised by sandy and rocky substrates covered

Figure 1. Area of the study – Archipelagos of Egadi Islands (a), Sicily, Italy. The line segments show the start and end
points of the hauls obtained with the pinger net (white line) and the control net (dark line).