Abstract
This project was funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government through the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, Project reference: 2011/021.
Highlights
Understanding species abundance distributions is key to successful natural resource management (Stewart et al, 2010)
This study focused on the four most abundant targeted reef fishes (C. auratus, C. rubescens, E. armatus, L. miniatus) and two of the most abundant non-target reef fishes sampled using POTBots, i.e., Western king wrasse (Coris auricularis) and Footballer sweep (Neatypus obliquus) (Table 1)
Novel automated cameras (POTBots) deployed during standard commercial Western Rock Lobster Fishery activities successfully collected 398 snapshot video samples of fishes over an 18 month period. They effectively characterized the abundance distributions of common target and non-target demersal fishes across ∼750 km of the west coast of Australia. This enabled the evaluation and quantification of the extent to which environmental and anthropogenic factors are related to the abundance distribution of each species of interest
Summary
Understanding species abundance distributions is key to successful natural resource management (Stewart et al, 2010). Relatively consistent unimodal abundance distributions of fish have been observed along the extensive (∼1,500 km), north-south oriented marine environment of the west coast of Australia (Hutchins, 2001; Langlois et al, 2012a). These distributions have been attributed to the region’s relatively consistent environmental gradient in terms of water temperature (Cresswell and Golding, 1980; Pearce et al, 2000). We predicted that species typically targeted by either recreational fishers (such as C. rubescens and E. armatus) or commercial fishers (such as C. auratus and L. miniatus) would be negatively correlated with indices of recreational and commercial fishing pressure
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