The impacts of climate change on marine species are often compounded by other stressors that make direct attribution and prediction difficult. Shy albatrosses (Thalassarche cauta) breeding on Albatross Island, Tasmania, show an unusually restricted foraging range, allowing easier discrimination between the influence of non-climate stressors (fisheries bycatch) and environmental variation. Local...

Fisheries scientists face a challenge in that virtually all methods of fish capture or observation are selective. Further, most fish capture methods can be applied to only a fraction of the entire area of interest. Thus, measures such as catch per unit effort (C/f) or catch per area can only be regarded, at best, as being proportional to the true population abundance (see Chapter 7). The method...

Populations of tunas, billfishes and pelagic sharks are fished at or over capacity in many regions of the world. They are captured by directed commercial and recreational fisheries (the latter of which often promote catch and release) or as incidental catch or bycatch in commercial fisheries. Population assessments of pelagic fishes typically incorporate catch-per-unit-effort time-series data f...

The American Samoa fishing ground is a dynamic region with strong mesoscale eddy activity and temporal variability on scales of <1 week. Seasonal and interannual variability in eddy activity, induced by baroclinic instability that is fueled by horizontal shear between the eastward-flowing South Equatorial Counter Current (SECC) and the westward-flowing South Equatorial Current (SEC), seems to p...

A major decline in the catch of the banana prawn [shrimp], Penaeus (Fenneropenaeus) merguiensis, occurred over a six-year period in the Weipa region of the northeastern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. Three main hypotheses have been developed to explain this decline: (1) prawn recruitment collapsed due to overfishing; (2) recruitment collapsed due to a change in the prawn's environment; and (3)...

Bottom trawling is a common fisheries method and also widespread scientific sampling for benthic demersal species. Selectivity catchability are usually estimated using different meshes studies with alternative methods rare. In this study, to improve the estimation of trawl selectivity, we compare bottom catches recordings made by camera fitted on top net. Scientific was conducted along Northeas...

Many pelagic species (species that live in the water column), including herring and krill, aggregate to form schools, shoals, or swarms (hereafter simply "schools," although the words are not synonyms). Schools provide benefits to individual members, including locomotory economy and protection from predators that prey on individuals, but paradoxically make schooling species energetically viable...

OBJECTIVE The present investigation used data from the Verona Diabetes Study to verify a main assumption of the capture-recapture method (source independence) and to characterize the subgroup of known diabetic patients missed by all sources whose number is estimated by the capture-recapture method. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The Verona Diabetes Study identified 7,148 type 2 diabetic patients...