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Effects of Variable Mortality and Recruitment on Performance of Catch‐Curve Residuals as Indicators of Fish Year‐Class Strength
Author(s) -
Catalano Matthew J.,
Dutterer Andrew C.,
Pine William E.,
Allen Micheal S.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
north american journal of fisheries management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1548-8675
pISSN - 0275-5947
DOI - 10.1577/m07-209.1
Subject(s) - statistics , fishing , mathematics , fish <actinopterygii> , range (aeronautics) , econometrics , environmental science , demography , biology , fishery , materials science , sociology , composite material
Abstract We built a simulation model to assess the performance of catch‐curve residuals as an index of year‐class strength for a short‐lived and a long‐lived fish life history type across a range of assumed values for the variation in recruitment (CV R ) and fishing mortality (CV F ). The magnitude of CV R strongly influenced the utility of catch‐curve residuals in assessing year‐class strength. The probability of finding a significant correlation between catch‐curve residuals and true recruitment values exceeded 0.9 when CV R was greater than 0.5 for the long‐lived and greater than 1.0 for the short‐lived life history types. This suggests that larger recruitment values have a greater probability of being successfully “tracked” through the age structure. Conversely, the magnitude of interannual variation in fishing mortality weakly influenced the performance of catch‐curve residuals. The inspection of individual catch‐curve residuals relative to the known recruitment values that produced them showed considerable scatter, indicating that the utility of this metric in assessing individual year‐class strength is small. Sensitivity analyses showed that the performance of catch‐curve residuals improved modestly with equal sampling vulnerability across ages and decreased slightly with increased fishing mortality. Our results suggest that catch‐curve residuals can serve as a rudimentary measure of recruitment under ranges of recruitment and mortality variation similar to those frequently observed in field studies.