Development of the tools for long term management of the Giant Crab Resource: Data collection methodology, stock assessment and harvest strategy evaluation

OBJECTIVES: 1. To develop a low cost, long term, giant crab resource assessment and data collection methodology. 2. To quantify biases in the historical logbook data to increase its value for resource assessments. 3. To obtain industry’s understanding/observations of basic biological and market processes (eg. moulting, egg-bearing, mating, migration, beach price influences) and how their fishing effort is adapted to this knowledge (eg. targeting of size classes, seasonality of effort, etc.). 4. To develop the ability to investigate alternative harvest strategies (sustainability of different TACs; closed seasons etc.).