Abstract
The size and age at which individuals mature is rapidly changing due to plastic and evolved responses to fisheries harvest and global warming. Understanding the nature of these changes is essential because maturity schedules are critical in determining population demography and ultimately, the economic value and viability of fisheries. Detecting maturity changes is, however, practically difficult and costly. A recently proposed biphasic growth modelling likelihood profiling method offers great potential as it can statistically estimate age-at-maturity from population-level size-at-age data, using the change-point in growth that occurs at maturity. Yet, the performance of the method on typical marine fisheries datasets remains untested. Here, we assessed the suitability of 12 North Sea and Australian species’ datasets for the likelihood profiling approach. The majority of the fisheries datasets were unsuitable as they had too small sample sizes or too large size-at-age variation. Further, datasets that did satisfy data requirements generally showed no correlation between empirical and model-derived maturity estimates. To understand why the biphasic approach had low performance we explored its sensitivity using simulated datasets. We found that method performance for marine fisheries datasets is likely to be low because of: (1) truncated age structures due to intensive fishing, (2) an under-representation of young individuals in datasets due to common fisheries-sampling protocols, and (3) large intrapopulation variability in growth curves. To improve our ability to detect maturation changes from population level size-at-age data we need to improve data collection protocols for fisheries monitoring.
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Data availability
Data from the North Sea is publicly available from Datras (http://www.ices.dk/marine-data/dataset-collections/Pages/default.aspx) and South East Australian data is available from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) upon request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Diego Barneche for advice in preparation of this paper. We also thank Andrew Honsey and Paul Ventruelli for helpful comments on a draft version of this manuscript and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority for providing length and age data from the South-Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery (SESSF).
Funding
HFW was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award. Research was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP190101627 to JRM and AA), the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment (HFW) (Grant No. HWRE2016R2047NEW) and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Science Research Grant Support Scheme (JRM).
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Wootton, H.F., Morrongiello, J.R. & Audzijonyte, A. Estimating maturity from size-at-age data: Are real-world fisheries datasets up to the task?. Rev Fish Biol Fisheries 30, 681–697 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11160-020-09617-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11160-020-09617-9