Dependency of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef’s tropical fisheries on reef-associated fish

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Brown, CJ
Taylor, W
Wabnitz, CCC
Connolly, RM
Griffith University Author(s)
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2020
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Abstract

Coral reefs have been subject to mass coral bleaching, potentially causing rapid and widespread degradation of ecosystem services that depend on live coral cover, such as fisheries catch. Fisheries species in tropical waters associate with a wide range of habitats, so assessing the dependency of fisheries on coral reefs is important for guiding fishery responses to coral reef degradation. This study aimed to determine how fisheries catches associate with coral reefs in Queensland, Australia. Queensland’s largest fisheries did not target fish associated with reefs, but specific sectors, particularly aquarium fisheries and commercial fisheries in the mid to northern region had a high dependence on species that use coral reefs. Regions that had a greater relative area of coral reefs had higher catches of species that depend on live coral, suggesting that coral area could be used to predict the sensitivity of a jurisdiction’s fisheries to bleaching. Dynamic analysis of stock trends found that coral trout and red throat emperor, the two largest species by catch for the reef line fishery, were at risk of overfishing if habitat loss caused declines in stock productivity. Management of fisheries that are highly dependent on reefs may need to adapt to declining productivity, but further research to support ongoing reforms in Queensland’s fisheries is needed to quantitatively link reef degradation to stock production parameters is needed.

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Scientific Reports

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10

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1

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© 2020 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

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Biological oceanography

Ecology

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Brown, CJ; Taylor, W; Wabnitz, CCC; Connolly, RM, Dependency of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef’s tropical fisheries on reef-associated fish, Scientific Reports, 2020, 10 (1)

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