Status Of Billfish Resources And Billfish Fisheries In The Western Central Atlantic
This desk review considered over 100 pertinent documents on the subject matter and 74 of them (Cited literature) were selected for their critical contents. Three main billfish species have been assessed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT): blue marlin, white marlin and sailfish. ICCAT is responsible for the statistical and biological data collected for billfish stock assessments and for the modeling approaches adopted to assess status of exploitation. Billfish are caught as bycatch in large Atlantic tuna fisheries. This review finds that billfish resources have been subjected to intense exploitation in the tuna and tuna like fisheries in the Atlantic Ocean for more than six decades, and as consequence billfish resources appear depleted, overfished and/or undergoing overfishing.
3
Report issue
