An Assessment of the Status of the Redfish in NAFO Divisions 3LN by

• Main Authors: A. M. Ávila De Melo, D. Power, R. Alpoim
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Sebastes mentella
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.578.7527; http://archive.nafo.int/open/sc/2005/scr05-052.pdf

There are two species of redfish, the deep-sea redfish (Sebastes mentella) and the Acadian redfish (Sebastes fasciatus) that have been commercially fished and reported collectively in fishery statistics in Div. 3LN. After peaking at an historical high of 79 000 tons in 1987 catches declined to a minimum about 500 tons in 1996, being kept at a low level since then. Catch on the last years of open fishery (1990-1997) and by-catch on the moratorium years (1998-2004) are analyzed against recent trends of survey indices. The 1991-2004 Canadian spring and autumn surveys are the main source of information used in this work to assess the relative abundance and dynamics of the beaked redfish population on Div. 3LN. The surveys demonstrate considerable inter-annual variability, the changes frequently being the result of single large catches being taken in different years. Sex ratio and maturity ogives at length were applied to survey abundance at length, for each division and survey series, in order to estimate survey female spawning stock biomass. Instead of looking to the survey indices on a year-to-year basis, trends of the respective mean values were analysed on a broader time scale. The assemblage of Div. 3L and 3N survey indices suggests that stock has been increasing from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s in terms of abundance, biomass, and female spawning biomass. However the magnitude of this increase remains difficult to quantify. Estimates of exploitation rate suggest that fishing mortality should be at a very low level when compared to the first half of the 1990s.