A critical question is: what regulatory measures and actions by the managers are most critical for sustainability and achievable within the constraints of management institutions? Decision-support tools exist to help evaluate stocks and formulate

management plans for sea cucumber fisheries [31], [32] and [33], but never before has their application been appraised and documented. To understand Selleck HSP inhibitor constraints of Pacific fishery agencies and guide them through the process of revising their management plans and actions for sea cucumber fisheries, a regional workshop was coordinated in Fiji during November 2011 [34]. Participants were fishery managers or senior fishery officers in charge of managing sea cucumber fisheries. Data on current management actions and institutional capacity shed new light on constraints in managing these fisheries and the need for a new management EGFR inhibitor paradigm. As sea cucumber fisheries are also economically valuable in small-scale fisheries in southeast Asia, the Indian

Ocean and Latin America, this study should be of value to improving management globally. Our findings are also relevant to other coastal and small-scale fisheries that are managed with similar institutional constraints. The study was based on data and responses from 13 fishery managers before, and during, a technical regional workshop in November 2011 coordinated by a consortium of research and development agencies [34]. It Farnesyltransferase examined sea cucumber fisheries from 13 Western-Central Pacific islands (Fig. 1). The workshop participants from each country were fishery managers from national fishery agencies, who had a deep understanding and involvement in their sea cucumber fishery and were in a position in the agency to influence management changes. Prior to the workshop, the fishery managers provided data on a series of variables about the human resource capacity, management approach, current management regulations, fishing activities, communication with stakeholders, enforcement

and inspections [34]. The managers were informed beforehand that the data would be used for research and subsequently published. The number of replicates (i.e. respondents) was lower than 13 for some questions that did not apply to certain fisheries. A principal component analysis (PCA) using PRIMER v6 software was used to examine the similarity in management capacity (technical and human resources) among fisheries agencies from response data (count and binomial) on eight questions; data were standardised by maximum values then square-root transformed prior to analyses. Based on manuals by FAO [33] and Purcell [32], seminars and plenary discussion sessions served to mentor the fishery managers on the fisheries biology of sea cucumbers, management principles and decision support tools [34].