On super fishers and black capture: Images of illegal fishing in artisanal fisheries of southern Chile

This study explores stakeholders’ images on illegal fishing as a way to understand its underpinnings and persistence. As an apt illustration, the king crab (Lithodes santolla) fishery of the Magellan region, Chile, was chosen, which operates under a semi-open-access regime. These images suggest that illegal fishing is a relational phenomenon; this is to say that it is distributed on a series of relationships, practices, and actors embedded in a particular geographic and cultural context. As such, illegal fishing is difficult to dismantle, since changes do not depend on the ideal behavior of one actor -“the ethical fisher”- but on transformations of intertwined practices of all actors across the value chain.