Brad E. Erisman

NOAA / NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center · Fisheries Resources Division

This chapter explores the fishery and biological implications of exploiting aggregating marine fishes, their general importance to subsistence, commercial, and recreational fisheries and the possible consequences of losing them. We synthesize and examine empirical data from a wide range of taxa to determine whether, when and why fish spawning aggre...

Hermaphroditism is taxonomically widespread among teleost fishes and takes on many forms including simultaneous, protogynous, and protandrous hermaphroditism, bidirectional sex change, and androdioecy. The proximate mechanisms that influence the timing, incidence, and forms of hermaphroditism in fishes are supported by numerous theoretical and empi...

Fisheries that target fish spawning aggregations can exhibit hyperstability, in which catch per unit effort (CPUE) remains elevated as stock abundance declines, but empirical support is limited. We compiled several fishery-dependent and fishery-independent data sets to assess stock trends in the barred sand bass (Paralabrax nebulifer) and the kelp...

We engaged in cooperative research with fishers and stakeholders to characterize the fine-scale, spatio-temporal characteristics of spawning behavior in an aggregating marine fish (Cynoscion othonopterus: Sciaenidae) and coincident activities of its commercial fishery in the Upper Gulf of California. Approximately 1.5-1.8 million fish are harvested...

Pacific Sardine (Sardinops sagax) in the Northeast Pacific Ocean are aged for stock assessments assuming the formation of two otolith growth bands (one opaque and one translucent) a year, but the periodicity of band formation has not been fully validated. To validate our ageing method, we investigated the periodicity of band deposition and somatic...

The Pacific mackerel (Scomber japonicus) is one of five coastal pelagic species listed in the Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC)’s Coastal Pelagic Species Fishery Management Plan, and has regularly scheduled stock assessments. This report provides a detailed summary of the life history information collected, analyzed, and used in the 2023...

Feeding patterns of sheepshead, Archosargus probatocephalus, in the northwest Gulf of Mexico were examined from samples collected at two locations in Texas, USA; Galveston and Port Aransas. A total of 53 sheepshead stomachs (Galveston, n = 35; Port Aransas, n = 18) had their contents analyzed along with tissue samples from the muscle and liver for...

Human-fortified ship channel inlets can represent the only connection between estuarine and coastal waters for tens of kilometers in some areas of the Northern Gulf of Mexico, making them bottlenecks for fish movement. A variety of fishes associate with the jetties that fortify ship channel inlets, and the deep depths of channel inlets relative to...

The Summer 2021 California Current Ecosystem Survey (CCES) (2107RL) was conducted by the Fisheries Resources Division (FRD) of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) aboard NOAA ship Reuben Lasker (hereafter Lasker) (Fig. 1), 6 July to 15 October 2021, and augmented by data collected from the Mexican research vessel Dr. Jorge Carranza Frase...

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are pre- dicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosyste...

Assessing marine fish community size spectra with hydroacoustics is challenging, as communities are diverse, schooling and swim-bladder-less fishes are common, and fish orientation is variable. We developed an approach to examine these challenges and applied it to data from 51 optic–acoustic surveys of fishes at petroleum platforms throughout the U...

Co-operation in the management of shared fish stocks is often necessary to achieve sustainability and reduce uncertainty. The United States of America (USA) and Mexico share a number of fish stocks and marine ecosystems, while there is some binational co-operation in scientific research, unilateral management decisions are generally the rule. We pr...

The vulnerability of a fish stock to becoming overfished is dependent upon biological traits that influence productivity and external factors that determine susceptibility or exposure to fishing effort. While a suite of life history traits are traditionally incorporated into management efforts due to their direct association with vulnerability to o...

Petroleum platforms provide high‐relief reef habitat in several ocean basins and are important to fishes and fishers alike. To determine which variables were important for shaping platform‐associated fish assemblages on a basin‐wide scale in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, we employed optic and acoustic methods to measure fish distribution (geographic and...

Relationships among somatic growth, climate, and fisheries production are poorly understood for coastal fishes in the Gulf of California (GoC), Mexico, but may serve as an adaptive management tool to set precautionary harvest limits for overfished, data‐limited stocks. We explored linkages among the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI), regional sea surfa...

Acoustic signaling in fish is commonly associated with spawning and sound production has been used to identify spawning sites for multiple species. However, the transmission loss of those signals and subsequent ranges at which those sounds can be detected are often not accounted for, confounding the spatial resolution of those studies. We examined...

Hydroacoustic surveys were conducted at 56 different oil and gas platforms in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GOM), along with a commensurate collection of physio-chemical data, in order to characterize patterns of fish distribution around platforms. Relative acoustic measurements of Mean Volume Backscatter "MVBS", Target Strength "TS" and fish density we...

We conducted a meta-analysis to summarize current knowledge on the effects of environmental and ecological drivers on the abundance of red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) within the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. We reviewed 1252 published research articles and extracted or calculated effect sizes for 12 drivers from 82 independent studies within 26 articles...

Per-recruit models have been widely used since the onset of modern fisheries science, particularly in data-limited situations. When the study fishery is a pulse fishery, namely a fishery operating over a brief period followed by a long fallow period, exploitation rates rather than fishing mortality rates are employed to calculate per-recruit quanti...

In light of rapid shifts in biodiversity associated with human impacts, there is an urgent need to understand how changing patterns in biodiversity impact ecosystem function. Functional redundancy is hypothesized to promote ecological resilience and stability, as ecosystem function of communities with more redundant species (those that perform simi...

Tropical cyclones play an increasingly important role in shaping ecosystems. Understanding and generalizing their responses is challenging because of meteorological variability among storms and its interaction with ecosystems. We present a research framework designed to compare tropical cyclone effects within and across ecosystems that: a) uses a d...

Among threats to marine species, overfishing has often been highlighted as a major contributor to population declines and yet fishing effort has increased globally over the past decade. This paper discusses the decadal reassessment of groupers (family Epinephelidae), an important and valuable group of marine fishes subjected to high market demand a...

For fishes that migrate to specific locations to spawn within large aggregations at predictable times, fishery independent surveys of the abundance, distribution, and population structure of adult fish at spawning aggregation sites can provide valuable data for fisheries monitoring and assessments. We tested the feasibility of using high resolution...

Petroleum platforms in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GOM) are important habitats for fishes and support regional fisheries. However, drivers of the horizontal (i.e., latitudinal and longitudinal) and vertical (i.e., position in the water column) distribution patterns of fishes associated with these artificial habitats are not fully understood on a GOM-w...

While monitoring fish sounds has enhanced our understanding of spatio-temporal patterns of spawning and acoustic communication, data interpretation often fails to account for environmental effects on acoustic recordings, resulting in uncertainty of whether measures of detected fish sounds correspond to rates of sound production, specific behaviours...

conservation and utilization in spawning aggregation fisheries: a trade-off analysis of an overexploited marine fish. Although the management of fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) often requires a precautionary approach that initially emphasizes conservation , understanding the dynamics of spawning and interactions with fishing activities can help i...

Many species of inshore, coastal, and reef fishes in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GOM) aggregate to spawn at specific sites and times. These fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) can be highly vulnerable to concentrated fishing pressure, which can have detrimental effects on entire stocks and ecosystems. There has been only limited research and management...

Fish populations undertaking ontogenetic or spawning migrations pose challenges to marine protected area (MPA) planning because of the large extent of their distribution areas. There is a need to identify the juvenile and spawner hotspots of these populations that could be set aside as MPAs. Species distribution models making comprehensive use of a...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Acoustic signaling in fish has been observed in conjunction with various behaviors but most commonly is associated with spawning. Sound production has been used to identify spawning sites for multiple species, but sound propagation characteristics are often not accounted for, severely limiting the spatial resolution at whi...

The reproductive and acoustic behaviours of Gulf grouper Mycteroperca jordani were studied at a spawning aggregation site in the southern Gulf of California, México. In May 2015–2017, divers located and surveyed a spawning aggregation site within Cabo Pulmo National Park. Adult M. jordani conformed to a lek mating system in which large males formed...

Fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) are massive gatherings of fishes that form for breeding and are critically important to the survival of the species that form them. The predictability of FSAs in time and space and the large numbers of fish they include make them important sites for fisheries and large sources of income for local communities. Unfor...

Courtship and spawning behaviors of coral reef fishes are very complex, and sufficient sampling effort and proper methods are required to draw informed conclusions on their mating systems that are grounded in contemporary theories of mate choice and sexual selection. We reviewed the recent study by Karkarey et al. (BMC Ecol 17:10, 2017) on the spaw...

The objective of this training manual is to provide a practical background on the use and implementation of active and passive acoustic methods in fisheries science and management. Specifically, this manual will present detailed descriptions of active and passive acoustic methods that can be used by fisheries researchers and managers to understand...

Spatial and temporal patterns of spawning activity are important measures of resilience in fishes that directly link environmental disturbances with reproductive success. We acoustically monitored spawning in spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus) from April through September 2017 at 15 sites near Port Aransas, Texas, which coincided with the landf...

Estimating the growth of fishes is critical to understanding their life history and conducting fisheries assessments. It is imperative to sufficiently sample each size and age class of fishes to construct models that accurately reflect biological growth patterns, but this may be a challenging endeavor for highly-exploited species in which older fis...

Supplementary information

Female spawning-stock-biomass-per-recruit (SSBR) over natural SSBR as a function of the exploitation rate of old adults for Gulf Corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus) (thick black curve) In each panel, the dashed-dotted black lines indicate the current exploitation rate of old adults of Gulf Corvina and the corresponding value of yield-per-recruit. More...

Alternative length-at-age models considered for Gulf Corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus) in our per-recruit model aR = age of sexual maturity (2 years; Gherard et al., 2013) - aOA = age of transition from the young adult stage to the old adult stage (5 years).

Yield-per-recruit as a function of the exploitation rate of old adults for Gulf Corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus) (thick black curve), when alternative growth models are used In each panel, the dashed-dotted black lines indicate the current exploitation rate of old adults of Gulf Corvina and the corresponding value of yield-per-recruit. Moreover, in...