REVIEW Decision-making in the Campeche Octopus maya fishery in two fishing communities Martha Laura Rosales Raya 1 & Julia Elena Fraga Berdugo 2 Received: 21 May 2018 /Accepted: 25 October 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Decision-making in fisheries, particularly those involving capture, is a vital moment for participants. Fishers weigh their options while considering factors such as the environment, economy, resource availability, sociocultural environment, ability, and preferred method/gear. Eventually, the decision will be to resort to illegal and/or undeclared practices, which can affect common-pool resources. Octopus maya is an immense common-pool resource off the coast of the state of Campeche, Mexico, which could become unsustainable if current illegal and undeclared practices continue. Synchronic and diachronic perspectives were applied with methods such as the following: revision of the legal and sociodemographic dimensions, design of an ethnographic questionnaire applied in 2006 and 2016, and recording of biological parameters for landed specimens. In response to constant and increasing market demand for marine products, decisions were made to employ Illegal and undeclared practices to maximize profits. The practice of diving for O. maya capture boosted production by increasing the biomass landed per boat while requiring half the time investment and lower fuel costs. Catch biological data clearly indicated the use of illegal practices, with sizes below the authorized minimum size (mantle length, 110 mm) and the presence of spent females. Questionnaire data suggested that each community behaved in their own way and established its own local decision-making systems while considering socioeconomic risk and market demands. Sustainable management of the Campeche O. maya fishery will require greater data transparency and fluidity between government institutions and fishers, negotiation of compliance with current regulations, and more effective legal enforcement of them. Keywords Fishing . Octopus . Illegal . Undeclared . Mexico Introduction Fishers have a toolkit of options they use in decision-making to optimize economic yields from the extraction of common- pool resources (CPRs). These resources represent a set of situations in which individuals are involved in decision- making that generates a sum of events (Ostrom et al. 1994). When many social actors are implicated in economic activities linked to CPR extraction, those involved are collectively af- fected in the decision-making process and its consequences. It is essential to distinguish between the resource system, the resource unit flow produced by the system, and their interde- pendence (Ostrom 1990; Pascual 1996; Ostrom 2009; Kooiman et al. 2005). Consensual collective actions are beneficial to CPR extraction-related economic activity, although to attain con- sensus communities’ socioeconomic surroundings must be known and understood (Ostrom et al. 1999; Degnbol and McCay 2006; Pomeroy 2011). Research addressing the be- havior of CPR users is generally placed within the Btragedy of the commons^ scheme (Acheson 2014; Acheson 2015) or applies game theory and the prisoner dilemma to model terri- torial changes and the presence/absence of cooperation among actors. As a social and economic group, fishers normally have their activity symbolized as a Btragedy of the commons,^ fre- quently confused with the use of open-access resources * Julia Elena Fraga Berdugo jfraga@cinvestav.mx 1 Facultad de Ciencias Químico Biológicas, Universidad Autónoma de Campeche, Campus I, Av. Agustín Melgar s/n entre Juan de la Barrera y Calle 20, Col. Buenavista, 24039 San Francisco de Campeche, Campeche, Mexico 2 Unidad Mérida, Depto. de Ecología Humana, Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINVESTAV del IPN), Antigua Carretera a Progreso Km. 6, 97310 Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico Maritime Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-018-0127-3