Investigating the relative vulnerability of a temperate coastal fish community to a live wrasse pot fishery

Abstract

The European live wrasse fishery is a data limited fishery without a formal assessment. ICES recommends using the Productivity Susceptibility Analysis (PSA) to determine the relative vulnerabilities of species caught within data-limited fisheries. The PSA framework evaluates species’ relative vulnerability to overexploitation by scoring productivity and susceptibility attributes, from which relative vulnerability is calculated as a combination of these scores. The relative vulnerability of five target species and 55 potential bycatch species was investigated using the PSA framework, and findings were compared with published vulnerability estimates achieved by other methods. One target species, cuckoo wrasse Labrus mixtus, was of major concern, and another, ballan wrasse Labrus bergylta, was of moderate concern. Both are long-lived sequential hermaphrodites and should be prioritised for further quantitative assessment. Two bycatch species, viviparous eelpout Zoarces viviparus and spurdog Squalus acanthias, were of high concern. Both are viviparous fishes with low fecundity and long gestation periods. However, spurdog are distributed outside of the wrasse fishery and have never been reported as bycatch, so this species should not be considered vulnerable to this fishery. These results highlight the need to prioritize data collection for cuckoo and ballan wrasse and establish bycatch reporting for high-concern species. Vulnerability estimates were not consistent with those achieved by other methods, except for spurdog, which were of high concern due to their low productivity. However, discrepancies in the output of these methods are expected as the PSA framework incorporates fishery context, not just life-history traits.