Data for: Spatial and temporal genetic stock composition of river herring bycatch in southern New England Atlantic herring and mackerel fisheries

• Main Authors: Reid, Kerry, Palkovacs, Eric, Garza, John Carlos, Gahagan, Benjamin, Schondelmeier, Bradley, Hoey, Jennifer, Hasselman, Daniel, Bowden, Alison, Armstrong, Michael
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2022
• Subjects: Alosa pseudoharengus; A. aestivalis; bycatch; genetic stock identification (GSI); mixing proportion estimates; mortality estimates; Long Island; Long Island Sound; Block Island; Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.98sf7m0mz

Anadromous river herring (alewife and blueback herring) persist at historically low abundances and are caught as bycatch in commercial fisheries, potentially preventing recovery despite conservation efforts. We used newly established single-nucleotide polymorphism genetic baselines for alewife and blueback herring to define fine-scale reporting groups for each species. We then determined the occurrence of fish from these reporting groups in bycatch samples from a Northwest Atlantic fishery over four years.Within sampled bycatch events, the highest proportions of alewife were from the Block Island (34%) and Long Island Sound (22%) reporting groups, while for blueback herring the highest proportions were from the Mid-Atlantic (47%) and Northern New England (24%) reporting groups. We then quantified stock-specific mortality in a focal geographic area (~3500 km 2 including Block Island Sound) of high bycatch incidence and sampling effort, where the most accurate estimates of mortality could be made. During this period, we estimate that bycatch took about 4.6 million alewife and 1.2 million blueback herring, highlighting the need to reduce bycatch mortality for the most depleted river herring stocks. We have provided the R-code for simulations to estimate the accuracy of RG for alewife and blueback herring and to estimate mixing proportion estimates for alewife and blueback herring bycatch. Funding provided by: National Science Foundation Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001 Award Number: NSF-DEB 1343916 Funding provided by: National Science Foundation Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008982 Award Number: NSF-DEB 1556378 Funding provided by: National Science Foundation Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008982 Award Number: NSF-DEB 2102763 Funding provided by: Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100018323 Award Number: ASMFC 15-0105 Funding provided by: Atlantic States ...