Why best catches?

Why ask about best catches?

A common concern is whether people can accurately remember past catches. This concern is valid, but it needs to be treated carefully. People may struggle to remember routine days, average catches, or exact sequences of ordinary events. However, memorable personal events are often recalled more clearly than routine experiences, particularly when they are emotionally significant, unusual, or repeatedly retold^11,15.

Fishing is full of these memorable events. The biggest fish, the fullest net, the best tide, the heaviest basket, or the day when “everything came together” often becomes part of a fisher’s personal history. BECCA deliberately uses this cognitive strength. It asks about memorable high points, not vague averages from the distant past.

This does not mean that all memories are perfect. A respondent may round numbers, confuse dates, or report an event that was influenced by unusual conditions. BECCA manages this uncertainty by asking many respondents the same structured questions, collecting effort data, recording confidence, aggregating responses, and returning results to the community for validation.

Previous uses of best-catch approaches

Although BECCA is newly named and standardised here, best-catch style questioning has a strong history in peer-reviewed fisheries research. Sáenz-Arroyo et al. used fishers’ anecdotes and historical information to reassess the status of Gulf grouper in the Gulf of California^4,5, helping to expose shifting baselines and historical decline. Tesfamichael et al. used fishers’ knowledge from the Red Sea to generate long time series of catch rates⁷, including locally meaningful units such as kilograms, boxes, sacks, and bundles. Bender et al. combined local ecological knowledge, landing data, and underwater visual census to reveal overexploitation in a multi-gear artisanal fishery in Brazil⁶. Lavides et al. used fishers’ knowledge in the Philippines to infer coral reef fish disappearances⁸. Leduc et al. used local ecological knowledge to support conservation assessments for data-poor sharks in Brazil⁹. Braga et al. used fishers’ knowledge to reconstruct historical changes in Allis shad in the Minho River between Spain and Portugal¹⁰.

These studies differ in design, species, geography, and terminology, but they share a central insight. Fishers can provide quantitative historical information when they are asked questions that allow them to answer numerically. BECCA takes this wider practice and turns it into a standardised, practical protocol.