Abstract
ABSTRACT The Brazilian North coast is one of the world’s most important shrimp fishery grounds, with a total area of approximately 223,000 km2. However, the available data on the diversity of fish caught by the region’s industrial trawler fleet are limited to the commercially-valuable species. This lacuna in the data on the region’s marine fish fauna is worrying, both for the management of stocks and the conservation of the local biodiversity. The present study was based on a comprehensive inventory of the teleost fishes captured by the industrial outrigger trawling operations off the North coast of Brazil. This inventory recorded 201 species belonging to 64 families and 20 orders, and revealed a unique fauna, characterized by 17 endemic species, and a mixture of estuarine-dependent and marine species, mainly associated with coral reefs. The Kernel density analysis indicated that the industrial trawling fleet operates within an important ecotone, which encompasses the transition zones of different fish communities found off the Brazilian North coast.
Highlights
Different fishery techniques are used to target determined species, all types of industrial fishery operation result in the harvesting of bycatch, that is, species captured unintentionally (Eayrs, 2007; Davies et al, 2009)
42 (19.4%) of the 216 species were recorded from the North coast of Brazil for the first time (Tab. 1, column C), and five species (Pythonichthys sanguineus, Aplatophis chauliodus, Lonchopisthus higmani, Caulolatilus guppyi, and Ogcocephalus pumilus) had not previously been recorded in Brazil (Menezes et al, 2003)
The bony fish diversity and bycatch caught by industrial trawlers off the Brazilian North coast
Summary
Different fishery techniques are used to target determined species, all types of industrial fishery operation result in the harvesting of bycatch, that is, species captured unintentionally (Eayrs, 2007; Davies et al, 2009). The discarding of low-value species may have a significant impact on the local biodiversity (Clucas, 1997), altering the structure of fish assemblages (Wassenberg, Hill, 1989; Anderson et al, 2013), and vanishing species that may significantly impairthe the trophic web. This makes the effective management of outrigger trawling operations a major challenge (Davies et al, 2009)
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