Abstract

The National Marine Fisheries Service conducts fishery independent surveys of fish located on deep reefs, ledges and banks on the continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. The survey uses stationary cameras to estimate an index of abundance. Water depth sampled ranges from 15 m to 150 m. A weakness of cameras is the inability to obtain estimates of fish size. We have developed a digital camera system to obtain estimates of fish lengths. The system is comprised of digital stereo still cameras from Videre, Inc., a digital CCD camera, CPU and hardrives mounted in an aluminum housing with a depth capability of 600 meters. We use Vision Measurement System (VMS) software from Geometrics, Inc to process stereo images to determine fish lengths. The system was deployed during the 2008 annual survey of a gag spawning aggregation protection area on the west Florida shelf. Measured fished averaged 500 mm TL (range: 148 mm to 1245 mm) and were located 0.5 m to 4.6 m from the camera (mean 1.7 m).

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