MOTE MARINE LABORATORY

New Project

On October 1st, Mote researchers began a recently awarded NOAA/ NMFS Cooperative Research Program project. The project entitled "Cooperative Long-line Sampling of the West Florida Shelf Shallow Water Grouper Complex: Characterization of Life History, Undersized Bycatch and Targeted Habitats", targets red grouper, gag and scamp. On this project the Principal Investigators, Karen Burns and Dr. Brad Robbins at Mote, Bob Spaeth of Madeira Marine Services, Madeira Beach, FL and our NMFS partner is Dr. Gary Fitzhugh at the Panama City, FL Lab.

The objectives include:

To provide bycatch information collected during long-line fishing trips for the target species.

To obtain catch and release mortality rates relative to depth and gear for red grouper, gag and scamp

To obtain movement and migration patterns for the target species in the eastern Gulf of Mexico

To collect biological samples (otoliths and gonads) to determine ages of fish in the fishery and gonads to assess reproductive condition and fecundity

To collect swim bladder samples from fish caught on long-lines and by fish traps fished at various depths to compare with previously collected swim bladders from fish caught on hook-and-line

To characterize essential fish habitat for red grouper from the southwest Florida shelf.

The long-line vessels and observer/sample collector will be provided by fishing liaison Bob Spaeth. The biological samples (otoliths and gonads) will be processed by NMFS Panama City Lab staff. Swim bladder samples and tagging data will be kept and evaluated at Mote by Karen Burns and her staff, Nick Parnell, Pete Simmons, Tanya Merkle and Teresa DeBruler. Dr. Brad Robbins, the Manager of Mote’s Landscape Ecology Program, will be the Task Leader for the habitat research. He will develop the GIS database with the associated metadata and will be responsible for the geostatistical analysis of the spatial data.

 

We Need Your Help

How can you participate in this new project? You can continue to tag/release red grouper and gag at various depths. You can also start tagging scamp.

Although we began tagging scamp in 1990, they were never a target species for undersized survival studies. We only have 396 scamp tagged. We need more scamp tagged, so we have return rates from hook-and-line to compare with the long-line and trap data. To date, we have 30 scamp returns (7.6%) from the 396 captured by hook-and-line. If you catch undersized scamp, please tag/ release them and send us the data, just as you already do for the other 5 target species.