Abstract
This study investigated the contribution of shrimp stocks in supporting the production of valuable predator species. Fishery-independent data on white shrimp, brown shrimp, and selected fish species (spotted seatrout, red drum, and southern flounder) were collected from 1986 to 2014 by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and converted to catch-per-unit effort (CPUE). Here, the associations between the CPUEs of fish species as predators and those of shrimp species as prey in each sampled bay and sampling season were analyzed using co-integration analysis and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR). Co-integration analysis revealed significant associations between 31 of 70 possible fish/shrimp pairings. The analysis also revealed discernible seasonal and spatial patterns. White shrimp in August and brown shrimp in May were associated with fish CPUEs in bays located along the lower coast of Texas, whereas white shrimp in November was more strongly associated with fish CPUEs in bays located on the upper coast. This suggests the possible influence of latitudinal environmental gradient. The results of the PLSR, on the other hand, were not conclusive. This may reflect the high statistical error rates inherent to the analysis of short non-stationary time series. Co-integration is a robust method when analyzing non-stationary time series, and a majority of time series in this study was non-stationary. Based on our co-integration results, we conclude that the CPUE data show significant associations between shrimp abundance and the three predator fish species in the tested regions.
Highlights
The shrimp industry is the most valuable fishery in the Gulf of Mexico; it is worth $588 million USD and accounts for 65% of the total US shrimp landings [1]
As a part of a project aimed at evaluating the importance of penaeid shrimp as a forage species, we investigated the statistical association between time series (1986–2014) data on the catch-per-unit effort (CPUE) of shrimp and fish
As this study aimed to investigate the importance of shrimp as forage species for larger fish species, the fish time series were treated as dependent variables while the shrimp time series were treated as independent variables (Table 1)
Summary
The shrimp industry is the most valuable fishery in the Gulf of Mexico; it is worth $588 million USD and accounts for 65% (by weight) of the total US shrimp landings [1]. The important ecological contribution of shrimp stocks in supporting the production of valuable predator species is underestimated. Recent stock assessment models [2, 3] estimated that approximately 62 billion brown shrimp (Farfantepenaeus aztecus) and 14 billion white shrimp. The prerecruitment natural mortality rate (i.e., that of post-larval and juvenile shrimp) was estimated to be 23–61% when predation was included, but only 3% in the absence of predation [4]. This suggests that a significant number of juveniles are preyed upon before becoming available to the fishery, and highlights the potential importance of shrimp as a forage species
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