Abstract
AbstractData‐limited fisheries assessment methods have great potential to help inform small island communities on the status of their fisheries resources. In this paper, we provide a length‐based assessment of an artisanal fishery that primarily targets spawning aggregations of Shortjaw Bonefish Albula glossodonta at Anaa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. We assessed the length‐frequency distribution of the spawning stock across a 3‐year period (2016–2018). During this time, male and female Shortjaw Bonefish were fully recruited to the fishery at age 4 and age 5, respectively. Fishing mortality was over two times the range of natural mortality for this species (i.e., 0.21–0.32), and based on these estimates of natural mortality, the annual spawning potential ratio of the population was between 7% and 20% across the sampling years. The majority of the catch was sexually mature, with 78, 95, and 95% of the annual female catch in 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively, being equal to or greater than the length of first maturity (i.e., 48 cm FL). However, every fisheries indicator and biological reference point suggested that the fishery was overexploited and in need of management intervention. To this aim, the community of Anaa (1) established an Educational Managed Marine Area, which overlaps with the Shortjaw Bonefish migratory corridor adjacent to Tukuhora village and (2) instated a temporal rahui (a traditional conservation method) inside the Educational Managed Marine Area during the peak months of the spawning season.
Highlights
These methods utilize a combination of life history parameters and the length-frequency distribution of a harvested fish population to reveal its status in a given fishery and have made substantial contributions to the management of numerous data-poor fisheries (Ault et al 2008; Nadon et al 2015; Prince et al 2015; Usseglio et al 2016)
The management of small-scale, data-limited fisheries can benefit from cost-effective methodologies such as the length-based methods applied in this study
There are a variety of assumptions that could affect the outcomes of these length-based fisheries models
Summary
These include the following: (1) an estimation of fishing mortality and recruitment of male and female bonefish in the trap fishery with an age-based catch curve, (2) the estimation of the spawning potential ratio (SPR) of the atoll's bonefish population and how far the fishery deviates from the biological reference point (F40%), and (3) the application of the Froese (2004) fisheries indicators to assess the sustainability and status of this fishery. These observations provided length-frequency distributions of the male and female components of the bonefish spawning population during the annual fishing seasons from 2016 to 2018.
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