Multidisciplinary acoustic survey PELACUS0314: preliminary results on fish abundance estimates and distribution

Abstract

PELACUS 0314 was characterised by relative stable weather conditions along the surveyed area. Besides, there was an important increase in backscattering energy as compared with the previous year. This resulted in an increase of the biomass estimated for the majority of the fish species, but still sardine is at lowest productivity ever recorded. Good recruitment would be observed in horse mackerel, but for the rest of the fish species, no strong signals for age group 1 have been detected. The reasons for this increase would be related to the weather stability which could have increased the fish availability either for a change in the behaviour (i.e. spatial pattern distribution) or for an increase in the food availability. This is relevant accounting the increase of the occurrence of mackerel subsurface layers observed this year. As PELACUS is a multidisciplinary survey series (we collect environmental and biological ancillary information, stomach contents, including CTD cats, plankton tows or continuous records of plankton, eggs, S, T and flourometry), we will try to explain this change of behaviour. Our main hypothesis is that these species could follow mackerel when is undertaking vertical migration, probably related with the spawning activity, just for feeding eggs and, therefore, changing the expected schooling behaviour by the dispersed one, used during the feeding activity.