| dc.description.abstract | Deepwater (>150 m) fishes tend to have life history characteristics, such as slow growth, late age of maturity, and long lives, which make them especially vulnerable to overfishing. World-wide, deepwater fisheries are often overexploited and in a state of collapse prior to the collection of biological data or oversight by fisheries managers. In the western Caribbean, shallow coastal fisheries are overfished, leading fishers to explore the nearshore deepwater fishing grounds to supplement income. Though deepwater fisheries are widespread throughout the Caribbean Sea, little information is available about the grouper and snapper species targeted across the region. This thesis aims to fill crucial data gaps on the fish and fisheries in the MesoAmerican countries of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras in the western Caribbean and to provide practical, low cost, and meaningful tools for managers and conservation groups to inform management going forward. In Chapter I, I characterize the fishery in each of the four MesoAmerican countries to determine the scope and history of deepwater fishing in the region. Chapter II focuses on the spatial and depth distributions of targeted grouper and snapper species in Belize and Honduras, and investigates whether higher fishing rates have already affected deepwater species in Honduras. For Chapter III, several life history characteristics of an important deepwater snapper species are investigated, using bomb radiocarbon dating to validate the ageing protocol and determine the longevity of a snapper species that is important to the fishery across the region. The analysis introduces a low-cost method for ageing cardinal snappers using otolith morphology. Finally, Chapter IV brings these data together to provide an Ecological Risk Assessment for the Effects of Fishing and Management for ten commercially important species, as well as a practical toolkit for stakeholders that is user-friendly and open access. The toolkit provides guidance for producing a Productivity and Susceptibility Assessment, and gives specific recommendations based on user inputs. This dissertation provides evidence that deepwater fishes are vulnerable to overexploitation by small-scale fisheries, and shows that practical conservation and management measures, such as time area closures are necessary for the continuation of the fishery. | en_GB |
