Bottomfish Gear Calibration

Pacific Islands Fisheries Group (PIFG) recently completed its third bottomfish gear calibration research study off of Maui.  The Maui Gear Calibration Cruise ran from April 15 to 29, 2013. This was the first cruise where the four treatments have been simultaneously deployed – BotCam, SeaBED AUV, Active Acoustics, and PIFG Research Fishing. The vessels were able to fish 10 sampling days covering 151 grids.

PIFG worked with the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC) through a Cooperative Research Project Grant to assess Hawaii’s bottomfish fishery. The purpose of this research was to gather data to develop fishery independent sampling protocols to help monitor Hawaii’s bottomfish population.

In addition to providing the commercial fishing effort, the fishermen assisted by tagging 200 fish from the Deep 7 complex of species, and contributed to the collection of bio samples for life history studies. The life history study is essential in determining age, size, and time (season) of maturity for each managed species. This information is critical for fisheries assessment and future management decisions.

During the recent Maui study PIFG coordinated data collection was done using commercial bottomfish fishermen along with trained PIFG observers.  The observers collected important fishing information such as location, wind speed and direction, current speed and direction, start and end time of each line dropped, bait, and catch depredation.  These are the types of conditions and factors that can make or break a typical bottomfish trip involving the local fleet of small fishing vessels. All fish caught were identified and measured and all deep 7 species caught were retained for bio sampling.