Impacts of fishing gears on the fish abundance of Hakaluki haor in Bangladesh

A Study was conducted to evaluate the fishing gears’ impacts on fish abundance in the Hakaluki haor, between the periods of July 2013 to June 2014 under three upazilla viz. Kulaura, Fenchuganj and Baralekha (Located at Sylhet division; North-eastern part of Bangladesh). Fishers used ten types of fishing gears among them 5 were nets, 3 were traps, and 1 for both hand line and wounding gear. Among the different types of fishing gears; the highest number of species caught was for seine net (32), followed by cast net (27), gill net (25), lift net (21) and push net (17). For the traps; Charo (square basket trap), Foria (rectangular basket trap), Bana (fish barrier) were found to catch 11, 15 and 10 species respectively. Hand line was observed to be used to catch 11 species of carnivores group. For the observed nets the CPUE value (mean±SD) was found as 15.62±9.10, 1.04±0.33, 1.82±1.06, 2.51±1.04, 0.65±0.27 kg person−1 day−1 for Ber jal (seine net), Veshal jal (lift net), Koi jal (gill net), Ural jal (cast net), Thela jal (push net). In case of traps and wounding gears the CPUE value was 0.25±0.07, 0.24±0.07, 0.76±0.38, 1.10±0.44 and 0.67±0.27 kg person−1 day−1 for Charo (square basket trap), Foria (rectangular basket trap), Bana (fish barrier), Tenta/Teora (wounding gear) and Hat borshi (hand lining) respectively. Extrapolated estimation showed that the total fish production in Hakaluki haor was 322.13 kg ha-1 during the study period, which was more than national average production (wetland) of 257.95kg ha-1 in Bangladesh. This indicates that the Hakaluki haor has huge exploitation potentials sustainably.