Abstract

Whether or not baiting influences stickleback catch per unit effort (CPUE) remains a matter of debate among stickleback researchers: While the opinions about the impact of baiting on CPUE differ, supporting quantitative data are scarce. The effect of baiting and trap type on nine-spined stickleback (Pungitius pungitius) CPUE was studied in a field experiment conducted over four consecutive days in a small pond in northeastern Finland. The results show that baited traps yielded better (mean CPUE = 1.24 fish/trap/d) catches than unbaited traps (mean CPUE = 0.66); however, there were also differences in CPUE depending on the type of collapsible trap that was used. The trap type effect on CPUE seemed to differ among age classes – the finer meshed trap caught more young-of-the-year fish than the coarse-meshed one, whereas the opposite was true for the older and larger individuals. The results agree with those of an earlier more restricted study conducted in the same locality: Together, these results provide strong evidence for the positive impact of baiting on nine-spined stickleback CPUE.

Highlights

  • Apart from the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) fishery for the purposes of fish oil production and/or poultry forage (e.g., J€arvi 1932; Ojaveer 1999), the interest toward sticklebacks as a fishery target has received little attention in the scientific literature

  • Repeated measures analyses revealed that total catch per unit effort (CPUE) was significantly influenced by treatment (Table 1a), with baited traps yielding a higher CPUE than the unbaited or foil traps (Fig. 1)

  • The baiting mainly seemed to influence the CPUE of older and larger nine-spined sticklebacks, but it did not have an effect on the CPUE of the young-of-the-year fish

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Summary

Introduction

Apart from the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) fishery for the purposes of fish oil production and/or poultry forage (e.g., J€arvi 1932; Ojaveer 1999), the interest toward sticklebacks as a fishery target has received little attention in the scientific literature. This is in spite of the fact that a large worldwide community of researchers has utilized sticklebacks as models in their scientifically diverse research since the 1960s (for reviews, see: Bell and Foster 1994; O€ stlund-Nilsson et al 2007; von Hippel 2010; Wootton 1976, 1984, 2009; Meril€a 2013). The effect of baiting on CPUE may differ even among ecologically similar species (Løkkeborg et al 1989; Furevik and Løkkeborg 1994) and within a given target population depending on the prevailing conditions (e.g., Bigelow et al 1999; Stoner 2004; Dupuch et al 2011)

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