Whether or not baiting influences stickleback catch per unit effort (CPUE) remains a matter of debate among stickleback researchers: While the opinions about the impact of baiting on CPUE differ, supporting quantitative data are scarce. The effect of baiting and trap type on nine-spined stickleback (Pungitius pungitius) CPUE was studied in a field experiment conducted over four consecutive days...

Industrial catch-per-effort (cpue) data are used as an indicator of population abundance and, contrary to strong cautions of potential biases, are often used without regard for spatial interactions as the only data source from which inferences are made. Recent controversy surrounding the status of large predatory pelagic communities has resulted from varying interpretations of the Japanese long...

Minnow traps are commonly used in the stickleback (Gasterostidae) fishery, but the potential differences in catch per unit effort (CPUE) among different minnow trap models are little studied. We compared the CPUE of four different minnow trap models in field experiments conducted with three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus). Marked (up to 26 fold) differences in median CPUE among dif...

One key issue for standardizing catch per unit effort (CPUE) of bycatch species is how to model observations of zero catch per fishing operation. Typically, the fraction of zero catches is high, and catch counts may be overdispersed. In this study, we develop a model selection andmultimodel inference approach to standardize CPUE in a case study of oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus...

Directed fishing effort for Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), their primary spawning grounds in the western Atlantic, has been prohibited since the 1980s due to a precipitous decline of the spawning stock biomass. However, pelagic longlines targeted at other species, primarily yellowfin tuna and swordfish, continue to catch Atlantic bluefin tuna in the GOM as bycatch. Spatial a...

In a letter to Nature, Myers and Worm present, for a wide range of oceanic ecosystems, an analysis of catches per unit of effort (CPUE) data, leading them to the conclusion of “a rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities”: After a sharp initial reduction, CPUE appears stable since more than twenty years at a level of about 10% of their initial value. Such a result makes quite evid...

A new habitat-based model is developed to improve estimates of relative abundance of Pacific bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus). The model provides estimates of ‘effective’ longline effort and therefore better estimates of catch-per-unit-of-effort (CPUE) by incorporating information on the variation in longline fishing depth and depth of bigeye tuna preferred habitat. The essential elements in the mo...

Although many studies have focused on marine resources, few studies have considered the resources of inland fisheries. Inland fishery resources are typically either monitored on the basis of catch data alone or are not assessed quantitatively at all, despite their social, economic, and ecological importance. Because freshwater ecosystems have been severely degraded by human activities, evaluati...

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...

The Southeast Alaska Coastal Monitoring (SECM) project has been sampling juvenile salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) and associated environmental parameters in northern Southeast Alaska (SEAK) annually since 1997 to better understand effects of environmental change on salmon production. A pragmatic application of the annual sampling effort is to forecast the abundance of adult salmon returns in subsequ...