Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Fishing Communities: Case Study of Black Sea Fishermen

Fishing communities around the world hold a wealth of ecological knowledge that no textbook, nautical chart, or sonar device can fully capture. This knowledge – built over generations of hands-on experience at sea – is deeply embedded in daily practice, shared conversations, and the collective memory of people who work together on the water. Ståle Knudsen’s ethnographic study of traditional fishermen on the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey offers one of the most compelling windows into how this kind of knowledge operates, why it matters, and what happens when it meets (or clashes with) modern science.

What is traditional ecological knowledge in fishing? 🔗

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) refers to the ongoing accumulation of knowledge, practice, and belief about relationships between living beings in a specific ecosystem. It is acquired by indigenous and local peoples over hundreds or thousands of years through direct contact with their environment and handed down through generations. In the context of fishing, this means that fishers develop detailed understandings of marine species, their habits, seasonal movements, and the underwater landscapes they inhabit – all through sustained, practical engagement with the sea.

TEK in fishing communities is distinct from what the U.S. National Park Service calls “user knowledge” (one person’s experience over a lifetime) and “local knowledge” (aggregated observations that have not yet been time-tested across generations). True TEK has been evaluated, validated, and refined by communities over long periods, making it a robust and adaptive body of understanding.

Community knowledge sharing through experience 🔗

One of the most important features of fishers’ ecological knowledge is how it is transmitted. Unlike academic knowledge, which is written down in journals and textbooks, fishing knowledge is shared through common experience rather than formal documentation. When a group of people work together day after day – hauling nets, reading waves, navigating currents – they develop a shared understanding that does not need to be stated explicitly. It lives in their routines, their conversations on the boat, and their collective decision-making.

Knudsen’s study of Black Sea fishermen, published in his book Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey, illustrates this perfectly. These traditional fishermen possess detailed knowledge of the ocean bottom – knowledge that is simply not available in official nautical charts or modern mapping systems. They know where the seabed changes texture, where rocky formations create favourable conditions for certain species, and where currents shift at different times of the year.

Experienced fishers and sonar interpretation 🔗

A striking example from Knudsen’s research is how large commercial fishing vessels recruit experienced local fishers specifically to interpret sonar signals. Modern sonar equipment can detect underwater objects and terrain, but the raw data still needs human interpretation. Local fishers, with their intimate knowledge of what lies beneath the surface, can read sonar outputs in ways that formally trained operators sometimes cannot. They know what a particular signal means because they have been fishing those waters for decades.

Yet, here is the troubling part: the contributions of these experienced local fishers often go unrecognised officially. They are brought aboard as informal consultants, their expertise is used to improve commercial catches, but their knowledge is rarely credited in any formal or institutional way. This reflects a broader pattern observed in fisheries worldwide, where indigenous and local ecological knowledge remains undervalued compared to scientifically produced data.

Indigenous knowledge of fishing banks (adas) 🔗

One of the most detailed aspects of Black Sea fishers’ knowledge concerns adas – flat underwater banks where certain fish species tend to concentrate. Small-boat fishers know the locations, shapes, and ecological characteristics of these adas with remarkable precision. Species like whiting and turbot are known to gather on these formations, and experienced fishers use this knowledge to decide when, where, and how to fish.

What makes this knowledge particularly interesting is that it belongs to a “community of practitioners.” No single fisher holds all the information. Instead, the understanding of adas is distributed across the community and maintained through shared practice. This is consistent with findings from global research on fishers’ TEK, which shows that each fishing community develops its own particularities and context-specific knowledge about local fishing dynamics.

Knowledge without maps 🔗

An important detail from Knudsen’s study is that although fishers understand the properties and formation of adas, they typically cannot represent them on a diagram or chart. This does not mean their knowledge is vague or imprecise – far from it. It means their knowledge is embodied and situational. They know an ada through the practice of fishing it – through the feel of the current, the behaviour of their catch, the depth readings on their equipment, and the landmarks on the shore.

Fishers use hand symbolism combined with standardised knowledge of fish behaviour and seasonal changes to communicate about adas. A hand gesture might indicate the angle of a slope or the relative position of one bank to another. This form of communication works perfectly well within the community but is nearly impossible to transfer to outsiders without shared context. As researchers studying fishers’ local ecological knowledge in other contexts have found, such knowledge is deeply embedded in practice and cannot be easily separated from the act of fishing itself.

Indigenous models and classification systems 🔗

Black Sea fishers do not simply know where to find fish. They also possess their own indigenous models of how the marine world works. These models include explanations for the origins and movements of fish, the effects of weather and seasonal changes on fish behaviour, and basic understandings of fish physiology.

Much of this knowledge comes from rational interpretation of direct observations. For instance, fishers observe that when the water temperature drops, certain fish species move to warmer areas. This is not mystical or superstitious – it is basic ecological reasoning derived from years of watching how fish respond to environmental conditions. A study of indigenous Turkmen fishers in the Caspian Sea found a very similar pattern: fishers carried extensive knowledge about fish species characteristics, behaviour, traditional fishing calendars, and the weather factors that influence fish availability.

How fishers classify fish differently from scientists 🔗

One of the most revealing differences between fishers’ knowledge and formal science lies in classification systems. Scientists classify fish using taxonomic hierarchies based on evolutionary relationships – grouping species into genera, families, and orders based on shared ancestry. This system is abstract and universal; it works the same way whether you are in Turkey or Brazil.

Fishers, on the other hand, classify fish based on behaviour, occurrence, and appearance. A fisher might group together species that appear in the same season, are caught with the same technique, or look similar in shape and colour – regardless of their taxonomic relationship. These categories are not designed for universal scientific communication. They are designed to provide guidelines for action. When a fisher categorises a fish based on when and where it can be caught, that classification directly informs what they should do next.

Research from Sri Lanka’s beach seine fishing communities supports this observation. Traditional fishers there use indigenous knowledge to predict the composition and quantity of fish arriving at their fishing territory, and their predictions have been empirically shown to be accurate and reliable. Their classification systems, like those of Black Sea fishers, are oriented towards practical outcomes rather than abstract categorisation.

The inscription gap: why local knowledge stays local 🔗

The primary difference between fishers’ ecological knowledge and formal scientific knowledge is not accuracy – it is inscription. Scientific knowledge is written down, published, peer-reviewed, and distributed through journals, databases, and institutions. It can travel from a laboratory in one country to a policy office in another because it exists in documented, standardised form.

Fishers’ knowledge, by contrast, lacks this formal inscription. Because it is transmitted through shared practice, oral communication, and hands-on demonstration, it does not easily travel beyond the local context where it was created. A Black Sea fisher’s detailed understanding of an ada cannot simply be written up and sent to a fisheries management office in Ankara. The knowledge is tied to the specific place, the specific community, and the specific practices through which it was generated.

This is not a limitation of the knowledge itself but rather a feature of how it is produced and maintained. As UNESCO’s work on fishers’ knowledge in fisheries science notes, both scientific and indigenous knowledge systems have their own strengths and underlying assumptions. The challenge is figuring out how to bring them together without distorting or extracting indigenous knowledge from its relational context.

The risk of “cognitive mining” 🔗

When institutions try to integrate traditional ecological knowledge into modern management systems, there is a real risk of what researchers call cognitive mining. This means selectively picking out the parts of indigenous knowledge that fit within an existing scientific framework while discarding the cultural, relational, and contextual elements that give that knowledge its meaning. This approach can be harmful – it treats living knowledge systems as raw material to be extracted and processed, rather than as complete ways of understanding the world.

The experience of Black Sea fishers who are recruited to interpret sonar signals but receive no formal recognition is a subtle example of this dynamic in action. Their knowledge is valued when it is useful to commercial operations, but the broader system of understanding from which it comes receives no acknowledgement or protection.

Why this matters for sustainability 🔗

The case of Black Sea fishermen is not just an interesting ethnographic detail. It carries direct implications for sustainable fisheries management and marine conservation. Fisheries management decisions are typically based on scientific stock assessments, satellite data, and regulatory models. But these tools have blind spots – they miss the fine-grained, place-specific knowledge that local communities hold.

A 2022 review of global TEK research found that fishers’ traditional ecological knowledge has contributed essential information on taxonomy, habitat, fish behaviour, migration patterns, and spawning seasons – information that frequently aligns with the scientific literature. Ignoring this resource means that management decisions are made with incomplete information, which can lead to overfishing, habitat degradation, and the collapse of local fish populations.

More importantly, when fishers’ knowledge is marginalised, the communities themselves are marginalised. They lose agency over the resources they depend on, and generations of accumulated understanding risk being lost entirely as younger people move away from traditional fishing.

Moving towards knowledge co-production 🔗

The path forward is not to replace science with indigenous knowledge, or the reverse. It is to create systems of knowledge co-production where both knowledge systems contribute on equal footing. This requires institutional changes: fishers need to be formally included in management consultations, their knowledge needs to be documented (with their consent and on their terms), and the policies that govern marine resources need to reflect the complexity that only local knowledge can provide.

Several successful models already exist. In Canada, the “Two-Eyed Seeing” principle – articulated by Mi’kmaw Elders – advocates for learning to see with one eye through indigenous knowledge and the other through Western science, using both together for the benefit of all. In the Solomon Islands, indigenous knowledge has been used to design marine protected areas and guide habitat restoration. These collaborations work best when they are community-led and when research objectives are co-developed with knowledge holders.

The Black Sea case study reminds us that fishers’ knowledge is not a quaint historical curiosity. It is a living, adaptive, and practically effective system of ecological understanding that modern fisheries science cannot afford to ignore.

What do you think? Should fisheries management bodies be required to formally consult and credit local fishers’ ecological knowledge before making regulatory decisions? And how can we preserve traditional knowledge systems that rely on oral transmission and shared practice in a world that increasingly demands written documentation?

References

1. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/tek/description.htm
2. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KnudsenFishers
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09640568.2022.2043257
4. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/4899
5. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2019.00130/full
6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11160-022-09746-3
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308597X15000779
8. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000150580
9. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.703938/full