Abstract

Simulation and empirica analyses were conducted to evaluate sustainability benchmarks for Puerto Rican coral reef fishes using average size , in length ,of animals in the exploited part of the population as an indicador variable of exploitation. Simulation results showed that an estimator of fishing mortality was relatively insensitive to trends in recruitment, and demonstrated favorable properties for detecting statistical differences between sustainable and non-sustainable rates of exploitation. In application, fishing mortality estimates from fishery-dependent size composition data were comparable to fishing mortality estimates from catch-effort time series. Average length was estimated from fishery-independent diver surveys for species in the exploited snapper-grouper complex. Our findings indicate that a majority of snapper-grouper species in Puerto Rico are currently fished at unsustainable levels, and that overfishing may be altering community trophodynamic structure.

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