landings data as well as the level of dolphin bycatch among international longline vessels in the WCA (Fig. 4 below). Over the past month, BOSF has given two webinars to the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) to update the Council on research conducted to date for the Dolphinfish Research Program (DRP) which included a detailed look at data collected throughout the tagging program as well as ongoing research in order to better document regional dolphinfish landings and fishing effort. These seminars were conducted upon request from SAFMC as the Council continues to gather information relative to Amendment 10 to the Dolphin Wahoo Fishery Management Plan. To review the slides we submitted to the SAFMC prior to the webinar please click here. The slides provide a fairly comprehensive review of research associated with the tagging program as well as additional slides on landings and effort data collected over the past several months. Here, we provide a brief overview of our research strategy on the latter.
In 1999, Dr. Robin Mahon published a paper entitled “Dolphinfish fisheries in the Caribbean Region” in Scientia Marina, a marine and fisheries science journal based in Barcelona, Spain, that provided the first thorough categorization of dolphinfish landings and fleet dynamics throughout the Caribbean Sea. Dr. Mahon used data up to 1995. Using Dr. Mahon’s work as a model, we have started to append 23 years of data to specific themes in his paper including trends in fishing effort for large pelagics, artisanal and small-scale fleets, large-scale commercial fleets; recreational fleets; fish aggregating devices (FADs), and trends in landings.