Characterizing the Preferences and Values of U.S. Recreational Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Anglers

The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Thunnus thynnus is the target of a recreational fishery along the U.S. East Coast that is thought to be of considerable economic value. In some years, recreational landings have exceeded the sector’s annual subquota due to changes in fish availability, limited predictability of angler effort, and difficulties in real-time monitoring of catch. Understanding the drivers of angler behavior is critical for predicting how effort and harvest may vary as a function of changing fish availability, regulations, or costs. To investigate angler decision making, preferences, and values, we surveyed private recreational anglers from Maine to North Carolina and employed discrete choice experiments to determine how regulatory and nonregulatory trip-specific variables influence trip-taking behavior. A latent class-ranked logit model identified two distinct classes of anglers who exhibited differing preferences in regard to the importance of nonconsumptive aspects of Bluefin Tuna fishing (e.g., catch and release). Income and recent Bluefin Tuna targeting were the primary determinants of class membership, and higher-income anglers who had targeted Bluefin Tuna in the past 5 years were significantly more likely to be in the class that derives substantive benefits from nonconsumptive angling activities. An annual consumer surplus exceeding US$14 million was estimated for the 2015 fishery. We considered potential angler welfare impacts of possible management changes (compensating surplus) and identified a large amount of latent effort currently present in the fishery in the form of consumptiveoriented anglers. As a result, liberalization of harvest regulations could potentially lead to a large influx of effort into the fishery, which could impede the ability of managers to maintain harvest levels within prescribed limits. Over the past several decades, resource management scholars have advocated for better integration of the social sciences into fisheries management (Voiland and Duttweiler 1984; Fenichel et al. 2013). Understanding the human component of fisheries is important for predicting how management actions will affect the well-being of fishery participants, as well as for informing the allocation of fishery resources among competing user groups (Orbach 1980). In addition, without properly understanding the preferences and motivations of anglers, predicting behavioral responses (e.g., effort and harvest) is difficult and can potentially undermine management’s effectiveness and threaten a fishery’s sustainability (Fulton et al. 2011; Fenichel et al. 2013; Hunt et al. 2013). Fishing behavior may, for example, change as stock status or management strategies change, and simply extrapolating past behavior under different conditions could lead to inaccurate predictions (Fulton et al. 2011). Furthermore, while determining the preferences and motivations of recreational anglers is challenging (compared with commercial fishers, who are often thought to be largely motivated by profit), understanding drivers of angler behavior for a given fishery is critical for *Corresponding author: william.m. goldsmith@gmail.com Received December 3, 2017; accepted March 14, 2018 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 38:680–697, 2018