Species composition and assemblage analysis of fishes caught as bycatch by the Patagonian shrimp fishery in the southwest Atlantic.

Bottom trawl fishing is the most used worldwide gear generating large amounts of discards due to bycatch of a variety of species. Shrimp fisheries are recognized for their high incidence in global discards. In waters of Patagonia Argentina (43°S - 47°S) an industrial shrimp fishery of high economic value is developed whose target species is the Patagonian shrimp Pleoticus muelleri.

Fish functional diversity as an indicator of resilience to industrial fishing in Patagonia Argentina.

The relationship between fish functional diversity and fishing levels at which its baselines shift is important to identify the consequences of fishing in ecosystem functioning. For the first time, the authors of this study implemented a trait-based approach in the Argentine Patagonian Sea to identify the vulnerability and spatiotemporal changes in functional diversity of fish assemblages incidentally captured by a trawling fleet targeting the Argentine red shrimp Pleoticus muelleri (Spence Bate, 1888) between 2003 and 2014. The authors coupled seven fish trophic traits to a reconstructed fish assemblage for the study area and by-catch and evaluated changes in fish species richness and four complementary functional diversity measures (functional richness, redundancy, dispersion and community trait values) along with fishing intensity, temporal use, latitudinal location and depth of fishing grounds, and vessel length.

Bottom trawl fishing footprints on the world's continental shelves.

Bottom trawlers land around 19 million tons of fish and invertebrates annually, almost one-quarter of wild marine landings. The extent of bottom trawling footprint (seabed area trawled at least once in a specified region and time period) is often contested but poorly described. We quantify footprints using high-resolution satellite vessel monitoring system (VMS) and logbook data on 24 continental shelves and slopes to 1,000-m depth over at least 2 years.