E. Gulf of Maine – Georges Bank American plaice Assessment for 2012

• Main Authors: Loretta O’brien, Josh Dayton
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: proportion of the landings are in the small market category (Table E4). Sampling intensity (met; Garm; Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.224.5810; http://nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/crd/crd1206/americanplaice.pdf

American plaice is distributed along the Northwest Atlantic continental shelf from southern Labrador to Rhode Island in relatively deep waters (Collette and Klein-MacPhee 2002). Off the U.S. coast, American plaice are managed as a single stock in the Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank region (Figure E1) where the greatest commercial concentrations exist between 90 and 182 m (50 and 100 fathoms). This stock was last assessed and peer reviewed in August 2008 at the GARM-II meeting (O’Brien et al. 2008). The assessment was conducted using VPA with total catch including commercial landings, large mesh discards, and shrimp trawl discards for ages 1-11+. For terminal year 2007, total commercial landings were 988 mt and fully recruited F (ages 5-8, unweighted average) was estimated to be 0.06. Spawning stock biomass was 15,659 mt in 2007. The 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2007 year classes were all estimated to be above the long term average (28.8 million age 1 fish). The spring and autumn research survey indices of abundance did not indicate strong trends since 2000. Recruitment indices of age 1 fish from NEFSC