Abstract

In 1985, the State of Florida and the National Marine Fisheries Service began a cooperative program to collect data from Florida's commercial marine fisheries. In this program catch-and-effort data are obtained from the commercial-fishery landings recorded at wholesale fish houses (Florida Marine Fisheries Information System Trip Ticket System, TTS) and data about specific catch are obtained from interviews of commercial fishers at dockside (Trip Interview Program, TIP). These two long-term data bases provide fishery managers with the critical information needed to evaluate fisheries and to assess the effectiveness of fisheries regulations. Landings data are collected from the TTS and include species composition, market category, catch weight, and fishing location. In TIP other information such as fishing gear used and fishing depth and location is collected. These catches are also sampled to collect biostatistical data inclUding species, sample weight, length-frequencies, and sexo In the Florida Keys, the TTS has collected data from more than 750,000 fishing trips, and the TIP has collected interview data from more than 3000 individual catches as well as biostatistical data from more than 100 species. The waters of the Florida Keys are essentially an extension of the Caribbean marine ecosystem, and a summary of data collected in the TTP and TIP monitoring programs established in the Keys illustrates the usefulness of such fisheriesdependent data-collection programs to fishery scientists throughout the Caribbean Basin.

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