King mackerel hooking mortality assessment. Final project report.

Abstract

This report describes a project that was conducted by Mote Marine Laboratory in order to test, in a general sense, the hypothesis that for king mackerel, most release mortality occurs during the first few hours after release, as compared to the following hours in the first day. Additionally, the research was designed to augment and add robustness to the previous assessments of release mortality of Spanish and king mackerel so as to provide fishery managers with a more meaningful preliminary estimate of king mackerel release mortality. Finally, the work provided an opportunity to obtain totally new basic information about short term movement patterns of a coastal pelagic species. Methods used for assessment included fish capture and handling, transmitter tags and harness and acoustic tracking. A total of 17 king mackerel and one Spanish mackerel were caught and tagged with acoustic transmitters during the summers of 1994 and 1995 in the Gulf of Mexico off of the west coast of Florida near Sarasota, and tracking information and other critical data is described.