Going Off the Deep End: Fishery Reserves and Considerations for The Management of Deep-Water Demersal Fishes

Abstract

Deep-living demersal fishes are an important resource throughout the tropical Indo-Pacific supporting commercial, recreational, and subsistence fisheries. Many of these species are long-living, slow growing, and late to mature making them particularly susceptible to over-exploitation. Effective management of these stocks are imperative to their long-term sustainability. This dissertation addresses the effectiveness of no-take fishery reserves in Hawaii as a strategy for managing these resources. I explore the ways in which we evaluate the appropriate spatial scale for reserves using acoustic telemetry and how these methods differ in deep-water environments. Applying this method to Pristipomoides filamentosus, a key species component of Hawaii’s bottomfish stock complex, I compare the range of their observed movements to a reserve off of Oahu’s eastern shore, finding the scale of movement to be less than a coarse estimate of the available habitat in this, and other reserve areas. Using a database of landings for the commercial fishery, I quantify changes in catch, effort, and fisher participation that have occurred since these areas were enacted and explore how these metrics changed disproportionately in areas where habitat has been protected compared to unrestricted areas of the fishery. Finally, I apply an integrative method for estimating growth, a key parameter for understanding stock dynamics, to P. filamentosus using existing datasets and mark-recapture data collected in the early 1990s. Parameters obtained using this method are then compared to previous estimates of growth for this species.