Productivity of Gears in Seasonal Floodplain Fishing: Case Study on Sholiamary and Gheramary Beels in Mymensingh, Bangladesh

Bangladesh is the largest floodplain land of the world, which constitutes 80% land areas and 73% of households of the country. In the floodplain beel area, there are three types of fishermen – part-time, full-time, and subsistence – who mostly depend on the fishing in the monsoon time. However, due to environmental degradation and over exploitation of resources the fish production in these beels has dropped down significantly. Therefore, to ensure the efficient ways of harvesting and to ensure the socioeconomic welfare of the fishermen, understanding the nature and efficiency of available gears is very important. To measure the productivity of locally used gears this study collected primary data from the beel Sholiamary and beel Gheramary areas from Mymensingh Sadar in Bangladesh through a questionnaire survey based on simple stratified random sampling method. The data were analyzed though descriptive statistics, percentile analysis, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) F-test, Post Hoc (Scheffe) test, and Pearson’s correlation test. The statistical tests were measured at 1%, 5%, and 10% significance levels. This study concluded that the physical productivity in terms of daily catches and economic productivity in terms of income from fishing differed significantly among the available gears—five fishing nets, one fishing trap and two wounding gears. The highest number of used gears was wounding, and the lowest one was seine-net. The highest fishing effort and fishing duration were recorded for bair, and lowest fishing effort was for seine-net and lowest fishing duration was for push-net. However based on catch per unit of effort the seine-net was found the most productive gear and the bair was the least productive gear. In terms of monetary return (TK), gill-net and long-line provided the highest value and bair the lowest.