Working with Industry to Assess the Selectivity of Fishery-Independent, Hooked-Gear Surveys of Reef Fishes in the Southeastern United States

Due to the limited availability of fishery-independent data for reef fishes in the southeastern United States, fishery-dependent data on catch, bycatch, and discards are often used to generate indices of abundance for assessment purposes.  For high profile species such as Gag and Red Snapper, management measures such as time or area closures and the implementation of individual fishing quotas have significantly altered fishing behaviors and subsequently the utility of fishery-dependent data for index development.  Accordingly, substantial effort has been expended in recent years to develop fishery-independent, hooked-gear surveys of reef fishes.  During the summer of 2013, we conducted a study in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to assess the species and size selectivity of three survey gears:  a short longline, a vertical longline, and a highly-standardized active fishing survey.  In conjunction with these surveys, industry partners were allowed to use their own fishing methods to assess whether additional species or sizes of reef fish were present yet not accessible to the fishery-independent gear.   Preliminary results indicate that all gears exhibited some measure of species or size selectivity.  Recommendations as to a robust survey design integrating fishery-independent and limited fishery-dependent sampling to adequately characterize reef fish populations will be discussed.