Bias in Hydroacoustic Estimates of Fish Abundance due to Acoustic Shadowing: Evidence from Day–Night Surveys of Vertically Migrating Fish

Abstract

We investigated the hypothesis that fish schooling behavior leads to underestimation of fish abundance when assessed by acoustic methods. Current methods for acoustic quantification of fish abundance rely on the assumption that fish biomass and numerical fish abundance are linearly related to acoustic scattering under all natural fish densities. However, cage experiments as well as field observations have indicated that acoustic shadowing effects occur at very dense and large aggregations of fish. Acoustic surveys of the pelagic fish community of Lake Memphremagog, Quebec, were conducted when fish were aggregated and dispersed. These differences in aggregation were related to diel responses to light levels. We found that estimates of fish abundance, as measured by echo integration, were consistently and significantly lower when fish were aggregated in dense schools. This bias was not due to diel changes in average echo level per fish, which exhibited no relationship to diel changes in vertical and hortizontal distributions. We conclude that the reduced abundance estimates obtained when fish were aggregated resulted from acoustic shadowing. Our data suggest that this bias may be as large as 50%.