University of Tasmania
Browse

Two scales of distribution and biomass of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) in the eastern sector of the CCAMLR Division 58.4.2 (55°E to 80°E)

Download (3.76 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 15:57 authored by Cox, MJ, Macaulay, G, Madeleine BrasierMadeleine Brasier, Burns, A, Olivia JohnsonOlivia Johnson, King, R, Dale MaschetteDale Maschette, Jessica Melvin, Abigail SmithAbigail Smith, Christine WeldrickChristine Weldrick, Wotherspoon, S, So KawaguchiSo Kawaguchi

Regular monitoring is an important component of the successful management of pelagic animals of interest to commercial fisheries. Here we provide a biomass estimate for Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) in the eastern sector of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) Division 58.4.2 (55°E to 80°E; area = 775,732 km2) using data collected during an acoustic-trawl survey carried out in February and March 2021. Using acoustic data collected in day-time and trawl data, areal biomass density was estimated as 8.3 gm-2 giving a total areal krill biomass of 6.48 million tonnes, with a 28.9% coefficient of variation (CV). The inaccessibility of the East Antarctic makes fisheries-independent surveys of Antarctic krill expensive and time consuming, so we also assessed the efficacy of extrapolating smaller surveys to a wider area. During the large-scale survey a smaller scale survey (centre coordinates -66.28°S 63.35°E, area = 4,902 km2) was conducted. We examine how representative krill densities from the small-scale (Mawson box) survey were over a latitudinal range by comparing krill densities from the large-scale survey split into latitudinal bands. We found the small scale survey provided a good representation of the statistical distribution of krill densities within its latitudinal band (KS-test, D = 0.048, p-value = 0.98), as well as mean density (t-test p-value = 0.44), but not outside of the band. We recommend further in situ testing of this approach.

Funding

Department of Environment and Energy (Cwth)

History

Publication title

PLoS ONE

Volume

17

Issue

8

Article number

e0271078

Number

e0271078

Pagination

1-19

ISSN

1932-6203

Department/School

Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

© 2022 Cox et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Wild caught crustaceans (excl. rock lobster and prawns)

Usage metrics

    University Of Tasmania

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC