David V Fairclough

• PhD
• Principal Research Scientist at Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Fisheries, Western Australia

Understanding changes in fish communities as oceans warm and cool and competition for space between established and novel species can be evaluated in biogeographic transition zones, such as the west coast of Australia. At ~30°S in this region, a cool anomaly occurred in the 2000s, between marine heatwaves. Over two years of that anomaly, surveyed r...

The ongoing need to sustainably manage fishery resources can benefit from fishery-independent monitoring of fish stocks. Camera systems, particularly baited remote underwater video system (BRUVS), are a widely used and repeatable method for monitoring relative abundance, required for building stock assessment models. The potential for BRUVS-based m...

The efficacy of fisheries management strategies depends on stock assessment and management actions being carried out at appropriate spatial scales. This requires understanding of spatial and temporal population structure and connectivity, which is challenging in weakly structured and highly connected marine populations. We carried out a population...

The diversity and abundance of fish inhabiting complex reef habitats poses some challenges to surveys based on optical techniques, especially for schooling fish which are difficult to enumerate with such methods. Acoustic surveys are often used effectively to estimate the abundance and distribution of schooling fish but suffer from boundary effects...

Context Globally, anthropogenic activities such as fishing and industrial development have affected fish abundance. Cockburn Sound, a crucial spawning site for the sparid Chrysophrys auratus near Perth, Western Australia, faces potential impacts from ongoing infrastructure development, such as ports. Aims To inform environmental-impact assessment,...

Released (or discarded) fish from recreational and commercial line fisheries can experience significant levels of post-release mortality (PRM), affecting sustainability. Although PRM effects are often considered in data-rich (integrated model) assessments, this is uncommon in data-limited assessments. This study investigates impacts of PRM when app...

The WAMSI Westport Marine Science Program is a $13.5 million body of research that is designed to fill knowledge gaps relating to the Cockburn Sound region. It was developed with the objectives of improving the capacity to avoid, mitigate and offset environmental impacts of the proposed Westport container port development and increase the WA Govern...

Obtaining reliable estimates of the effective number of breeders (Nb) and generational effective population size (Ne) for fishery‐important species is challenging because they are often iteroparous and highly abundant, which can lead to bias and imprecision. However, recent advances in understanding of these parameters, as well as the development o...

Released (or discarded) fish from recreational and commercial line fisheries can experience significant levels of post-release mortality (PRM), which can affect the sustainability of fish stocks. Although effects of PRM are often considered in relatively data-rich (integrated model) assessments, this is uncommon with data-limited assessments. This...

Obtaining reliable estimates of the effective number of breeders (Nb) and generational effective population size (Ne) for fishery-important species is challenging because they are often iteroparous and highly abundant, which can lead to bias and imprecision. However, recent advances in understanding of these parameters, as well as the development o...

Changes to management of a fisheries resource are often required to ensure ongoing sustainability. However, such changes can sometimes lead to unintended effects such as increased release rates and associated post-release mortality. These effects may be highly variable between species and areas. Recreational fishing management changes were introduc...

This study explored the extent to which the hermaphroditic and reproductive characteristics vary among five congeneric (Choerodon) and co-occurring species of the Labridae, a family in which hermaphroditism is widespread. Sampling was located in the large sub-tropical Shark Bay (26° S, 113° E), one of only twenty World Heritage Properties in Austra...

The patterns of variation at 12 microsatellite loci are used to determine whether Snapper, Chrysophrys auratus, is genetically homogeneous across its range in Western Australian waters and to elucidate the extent to which the genetic composition of this exploited sparid varies among regions in Australasia. Chrysophrys auratus was collected from sev...

Global warming is modifying the phenology, life‐history traits and biogeography of species around the world. Evidence of these effects have increased over recent decades; however, we still have a poor understanding of the possible outcomes of their interplay across global climatic gradients, hindering our ability to accurately predict the consequen...

Quantifying recreational fishing harvest by weight is vital for stock assessments and fisheries management. As it is impractical to obtain weights of all fish caught by recreational fisheries, harvest is often calculated from estimated catch in numbers multiplied by an estimate of average weight (usually as an arithmetic mean). The average weight m...

The efficacy of fisheries management strategies depends on stock assessment and management actions being carried out at appropriate spatial scales. This requires understanding of spatial and temporal population structure and connectivity, which is challenging in weakly structured and highly connected marine populations. We carried out a population...

Understanding the connectivity of exploited fish populations is critical to their management under both rapid and long-term environmental change. Patterns of connectivity are unknown for most fishes in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area (Western Australia), a large, shallow embayment in the eastern Indian Ocean, vulnerable to marine heatwaves. The c...

Rising temperatures and extreme climate events are propelling tropical species into temperate marine ecosystems, but not all species can persist. Here, we used the heatwave-driven expatriation of tropical Black Rabbitfish ( Siganus fuscescens ) to the temperate environments of Western Australia to assess the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms t...

A recovery program for the West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource was introduced between late 2007 and early 2010, based on the maintenance of retained catches of demersal species (overall suite and each indicator species) by both the commercial and recreational sectors below 50% of the catches reported in 2005/06 (original catch recovery benchmark...

The yellowspotted rockcod, Epinephelus areolatus, is a small‐sized grouper that is widely distributed throughout the Indo‐Pacific, where it forms a valuable component of the harvest derived from multispecies fisheries along continental and insular shelves. Samples of E. areolatus were collected from 2012 to 2018 from commercial catches and research...

Status of Australian Fish Stocks 2018

Status of Australian Fish Stocks - Mulloway

Marine fisheries in coastal ecosystems in many areas of the world have historically removed large‐bodied individuals, potentially impairing ecosystem functioning and the long‐term sustainability of fish populations. Reporting on size‐based indicators that link to food‐web structure can contribute to ecosystem‐based management, but the application o...

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a “Green List of Species” (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species’ progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a "Green List of Species" (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species' progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a "Green List of Species" (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species' progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a “Green List of Species” (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species’ progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a "Green List of Species" (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species' progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...

Marine reserves are a key tool for the conservation of marine biodiversity, yet only ~2.5% of the world's oceans are protected. The integration of marine reserves into connected networks representing all habitats has been encouraged by international agreements, yet the benefits of this design has not been tested empirically. Australia has one of th...

Many marine fish populations have declined due to the individual or cumulative impacts of increasing water temperatures, ocean acidification, overfishing and other human-induced impacts such as land run-off, dredging and habitat alteration. Some solutions may be offered by ecosystem-based fisheries and conservation management. However, understandin...

The ongoing need to sustainably manage fishery resources necessitates fishery-independent monitoring of the status of fish stocks. Camera systems, particularly baited remote underwater video stations (BRUVS), are a widely-used and repeatable method for monitoring relative abundance, required for building stock assessment models. The potential for B...

Baited remote underwater stereo‐video systems (stereo‐BRUVs) are a popular tool to sample demersal fish assemblages and gather data on their relative abundance and body size structure in a robust, cost‐effective and non‐invasive manner. Given the rapid uptake of the method, subtle differences have emerged in the way stereo‐BRUVs are deployed and ho...

Understanding the drivers of exploited fish abundance distributions is key to successful natural resource management, but it is costly to obtain this information at large spatio-temporal scales relevant to management. We used small programmable automated cameras (POTBots) deployed in commercial rock lobster fisher’s pots, during normal fishing acti...

The discovery and identification of species is fundamental to the documentation, conservation and management of biodiversity. The taxonomy of the antitropical Pseudocaranx dentex complex (Carangidae) is confused and inconsistently reported. Previous morphological analyses concluded that this complex consisted of three species, namely P. sp. ‘dentex...

The reproductive biology of Centroberyx gerrardi was investigated across ~2000 km of its southern Australian distribution, encompassing different jurisdictions and varying environmental features. Greater gonad mass and prevalence of spawning fish, along with lower ratios of lengths at maturity:maximum lengths and ages at maturity:maximum ages, were...

Globally, marine species’ distributions are being modified due to rising ocean temperatures. Increasing evidence suggests a circum-global pattern of poleward extensions in the distributions of many tropical herbivorous species, including the ecologically important rabbitfish Siganus fuscescens. Adaptability of a species to such new environments may...

Understanding migration dynamics of fishes that aggregate-spawn is critical if spatiotemporal closures to fishing are expected to protect them. Concern over fishing of Chrysophrys auratus spawning aggregations in embayments near a west Australian city led to an annual 4-month spatial fishing closure. However, the extent to which it protects fish mi...

Western Australia (WA) has a solid history for taking strong management actions to deal effectively with stock and fishery related problems, including those that are targeted by both commercial and recreational sectors. Here we outline three case studies that involved fisheries resource problems generated by different causes and describe the steps...

Contemporary multivariate statistics were used to test the hypotheses that the dietary compositions of three populations of labrids on the west Australian coast are related to body size and undergo seasonal changes and to elucidate the relative extents and basis for any dietary differences within and between those populations. Gut content analyses...

Distribution shifts of demersal fishes are important adaptive responses to warming oceans for species' persistence. Shifts are facilitated by factors such as adult movement and dispersal of pelagic larvae to normally cooler regions, where increasing ocean temperatures are now enhancing larval and juvenile survival. However, successful recruitment (...

Assessing the stock status of mixed and/or multi-species fishery resources is challenging. This is especially true in highly diverse systems, where landed catches are small, but comprise many species. In these circumstances, whole-of-ecosystem management requires consideration of the impact of harvesting on a plethora of species. However, this is l...

Rapid changes in video technology have allowed for the development of sophisticated, efficient methods for surveying fish communities, including systems that use single or stereo video cameras, which are baited or unbaited and used remotely, by divers or on Remote Operated Vehicles. Video methods are non-extractive and their deployment can be stand...

Coastal environments are highly productive and provide a range of ecosystem services, including crucial habitat for a variety of fish species. Many of these species are targeted by fisheries throughout all life stages. These systems, however, are subjected to a range of stressors, including broad scale environmental change (e.g. marine heatwaves an...

There is considerable interest in the processes that generate genetic divergence in marine species and the spatial and temporal scales over which these processes operate. Shark Bay, a large embayment (~13,000 km²) on the arid west coast of Australia, has been described as a focal point for genetic divergence in marine species due to its heterogeneo...

Understanding source-sink dynamics is important for conservation management, particularly when climatic events alter species’ distributions. Following a 2011 ‘marine heatwave’ in Western Australia, we observed high recruitment of the endemic fisheries target species Choerodon rubescens, towards the cooler (southern) end of its distribution. Here, w...

Global changes to fish distributions are expected to continue in coming decades with predicted increases in ocean temperatures and the frequency of extreme climatic events. In the eastern Indian Ocean during the 2010/11 summer, sea surface temperatures 4–5 °C above average and an unseasonal, anomalously strong, Leeuwin Current (LC) triggered a “mar...

As commercial fishing activity shifts to target different grounds over time, spatial gaps can be created in catch rate data, leading to biases in derived indices of fish abundance. Imputation has been shown to reduce such biases. In this study, the relative performance of several imputation methods was assessed using simulated catch rate data sets....

Restocking or stock enhancement programs have traditionally relied on captive broodstock to produce individuals for release into the wild. However, this is costly and may limit genetic diversity of the resulting progeny. If fertilised eggs could be collected from the wild and individuals reared for release, the genetic diversity of the released pro...

To address increasing community expectations and deliver the ‘social licence to operate’, fisheries management in Western Australia (WA) has been systematically adopting a suite of reforms termed Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM). EBFM extends beyond the fishery-level ‘ecosystem approach’ of considering ecological, social and economic obj...

The juveniles of many reef fishes behave cryptically during critical juvenile stages in their life history and thus the microhabitats they often occupy are not well known. Comprehensive surveys of reef fishes on the temperate mid-west coast of Australia identified that juveniles of the unrelated Epinephelides armatus (Epinephelidae) and Bodianus fr...

Assessments completed in 2007 and 2009 demonstrated that fishing mortality (F) rates for the Western Australian biological stock exceeded the limit reference point of 1.5 times natural mortality (M)3,4. Significant changes to the management of both the commercial and recreational sectors in the West Coast Bioregion (WCB) were introduced between lat...

In this study, a total of 212 eggs were visually identified as snapper Chrysophrys auratus. Real-time PCR confirmed visual identification in 69% of cases but corroboration varied widely among plankton samples. The use of molecular tools to support visual identification prior to adopting daily egg production stock assessment methods should be consid...

Bight redfish, Centroberyx gerrardi, is a demersal teleost endemic to continental shelf and upper slope waters of southern Australia. Throughout most of its range, C. gerrardi is targeted by a number of separately managed commercial and recreational fisheries across several jurisdictions. However, it is currently unknown whether stock assessments a...

Citizen science offers a potentially cost-effective way for researchers to obtain large data sets over large spatial scales. However, it is not used widely to support biological data collection for fisheries stock assessments. Overfishing of demersal fishes along 1,000 km of the west Australian coast led to restrictive management to recover stocks....

Supplementary Table 1

West Australian dhufish (Glaucosoma hebraicum), a marine perciform, possess a swim bladder which has associated muscles that are used in sound production. Individuals have been recorded producing sounds during capture that may be associated with disturbance from their normal behaviour. To determine whether individuals produce sound during natural b...

1. Citizen science can offer a cost-effective way for scientists to obtain large data sets over large spatial scales. However, specific programs for the voluntary provision of biological data by members of the public (i.e. recreational fishers) for use in fisheries stock assessments are relatively uncommon. Overfishing of stocks of demersal fishes...

Assessments of the key indicator species for the West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource (WCDSR; West Australian dhufish Glaucosoma hebraicum, Snapper Pagrus auratus and Baldchin groper Choerodon rubescens) in 2007 and 2009 demonstrated that the stocks were experiencing overfishing. Thus, between late 2007 and early 2010, substantial changes were ma...

Biological examinations of Glaucosomatid fish species have suggested that they could produce sound via swimbladder vibration, using "sonic" muscles. However, there have been few reported instances of it in the family. West Australian dhufish (Glaucosoma hebraicum) is an iconic teleost, endemic to Western Australia. Dissection of G. hebraicum in thi...

Marine embayments and estuaries play an important role in the ecology and life history of many fish species. Cockburn Sound is one of a relative paucity of marine embayments on the west coast of Australia. Its sheltered waters and close proximity to a capital city have resulted in anthropogenic intrusion and extensive seascape modification. This st...

Wakefield, C. B., Newman, S. J., Marriott, R. J., Boddington, D. K., and Fairclough, D. V. 2013. Contrasting life history characteristics of the eightbar grouper, Hyporthodus octofasciatus (Pisces: Epinephelidae), over a large latitudinal range reveals spawning omission at higher latitudes. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 70: 485–497. Demographic...

Complementary methods of otolith element analysis (IRMS of stable isotopes and laser ablation ICP-MS of trace elements) were used to elucidate the stock structures in Western Australia of the exploited demersal West Australian dhufish Glaucosoma hebraicum and Snapper Pagrus auratus. Residency of adults during their most recent part of life and the...

http://www.fish.wa.gov.au/Documents/sofar/status_reports_of_the_fisheries_and_aquatic_resources_2012-13.pdf

Age structure data is essential for single species stock assessments but length-frequency data can provide complementary information. In south-western Australia, the majority of these data for exploited species are derived from line caught fish. However, baited remote underwater stereo-video systems (stereo-BRUVS) surveys have also been found to pr...

R code for implementing KDE methods. (R)

Example dataset for KDE methods. (CSV)

The size and age data and patterns of growth of three abundant, reef-dwelling and protogynous labrid species (Coris auricularis, Notolabrus parilus and Ophthalmolepis lineolata) in waters off Perth at c. 32° S and in the warmer waters of the Jurien Bay Marine Park (JBMP) at c. 30° S on the lower west coast of Australia are compared. Using data for...

Over 800 species of fish produce sound, for a variety of reasons including distress, spawning and agonistic behaviour. An increasing number of sparids have been shown to be soniferous, but while studies of glaucosomatids (pearl perches) have shown the presence of likely 'sonic' muscles confirmed reports of sound production in the wild has been elus...

Determining the extent of dispersal in exploited marine fishes is essential for understanding their population dynamics and optimising management. The West Australian dhufish, Glaucosoma hebraicum, is a highly sought-after, large and long-lived reef-dwelling species, endemic to southwestern Australia. Stock assessments indicate that this indicator...

Biological characteristics of the marine species King George whiting Sillaginodes punctatus and Australian herring Arripis georgianus in three seasonally open estuaries (Broke, Irwin and Wilson Inlets), one permanently open estuary (Oyster Harbour) and one normally closed estuary (Wellstead Estuary) on the south coast of Western Australia have been...

A rapid and cost-effective assessment was required to provide advice to management on the connectivity between juvenile and adult life cycle stages of Baldchin Groper Choerodon rubescens, a labrid endemic to the west coast of Australia, which has high social value, but relatively low commercial fishery importance. To minimise costs we used laser ab...

This study demonstrated that the dietary composition of each of three abundant reef-associated labrid species in temperate Western Australia differed significantly with latitude and changed with increasing body size and almost invariably differed among those species when they co-occurred. These results were derived from comparisons and multivariate...

The Strategic Research Fund for the Marine Environment funded a range of floral and faunal research projects to determine the characteristics of the marine communities in the Jurien Bay Marine Park (JBMP), which was gazetted in 2003. This project has determined the diversity, density and species compositions of the fishes that occupy reefs, seagras...

In Western Australia, one of the most important commercially and recreationally targeted, yet understudied fish species is the redthroat emperor Lethrinus miniatus. The present study aimed to compare the relative abundance and size of L. miniatus in areas open and closed to fishing at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands and to assess change in these popul...

The habitats occupied by the juveniles and adults of five morphologically similar, diurnally active and abundant Choerodon species in the large subtropical environment of Shark Bay, a “World Heritage Property” on the west coast of Australia, have been determined. The densities of the two life cycle stages of each Choerodon species in those habitats...

The biology of four species of Choerodon (Labridae), the blue tuskfish C. cyanodus, the bluespotted tuskfish C. cauteroma, the baldchin groper C. rubescens and the blackspot tuskfish C. schoenleinii was studied in Shark Bay in Western Australia. These species are fished commercially and/or recreationally in this large subtropical marine embayment,...