Abstract
Conservation management of wildlife species should be underpinned by knowledge of their distribution and abundance, as well as impacts of human activities on their populations and habitats. Common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) are subject to incidental capture in a range of Australia’s commercial fisheries including gill netting, purse seining and mid-water trawling. The impact these fishery interactions have on common dolphin populations is uncertain, as estimates of abundance are lacking, particularly for the segments of the populations at risk of bycatch and in greater need of protection. Here we used double-observer platform aerial surveys and mark-recapture distance sampling methods to estimate the abundance of common dolphins in 2011 over an area of 42,438 km2in central South Australia, where incidental mortality of common dolphins due to fisheries bycatch is the highest. We also used the potential biological removal (PBR) method to estimate sustainable levels of human-caused mortality for this segment of the population. The estimated abundance of common dolphins was 21,733 (CV = 0.25; 95% CI = 13,809–34,203) in austral summer/autumn and 26,504 in winter/spring (CV = 0.19; 95% CI = 19,488–36,046). Annual PBR estimates, assuming a conservative maximum population growth rate ofRmax= 0.02 and a recovery factor ofFr= 0.5 for species of unknown conservation status, ranged from 95 (summer/autumn) to 120 dolphins (winter/spring), and from 189 (summer/autumn) to 239 dolphins (winter/spring) with anRmax= 0.04. Our results indicate that common dolphins are an abundant dolphin species in waters over the central South Australian continental shelf (up to 100 m deep). Based on the 2011 abundance estimates of this species, the highest estimated bycatch of common dolphins (423 mortalities in 2004/05) in the southern Australian region exceeded the precautionary PBR estimates for this population segment. Recent bycatch levels appear to be below PBR estimates, but low observer coverage and underreporting of dolphin mortalities by fishers means that estimates of dolphin bycatch rates are not robust. The effects of cumulative human impacts on common dolphins are not well understood, and thus we recommend a precautionary management approach to manage common dolphin bycatch based on local abundance estimates.
Highlights
Understanding the impacts of fisheries bycatch on marine megafauna species is one of the biggest challenges facing their conservation and management
Common dolphins in South Australian waters are subject to incidental bycatch in the purse seine and gillnet fisheries
Most of the dolphin entanglements and mortalities occur in the South Australian Sardine Fishery (SASF) core fishing area in central South Australian waters including Spencer Gulf, Gulf St
Summary
Understanding the impacts of fisheries bycatch on marine megafauna species is one of the biggest challenges facing their conservation and management. It has been recommended that in the absence of wide scale abundance estimates for a marine mammal population or stock, and where human-caused mortality is concentrated over a portion of a stock’s range, calculations of sustainable levels of human-caused mortality be allocated to the geographic region occupied by that stock, until a range-wide abundance estimate for the stock is possible (NMFS, 2005; Moore and Merrick, 2011). Such an approach has been used to evaluate sustainable levels of humancaused mortality on a wide diversity of marine mammals (e.g., López et al, 2003; Marsh et al, 2004; Slooten and Dawson, 2008; Cagnazzi et al, 2013; Parra and Cagnazzi, 2016)
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