Effect of escape vents on retention and size selectivity of crab pots for swimming crab Portunus trituberculatus in the East China Sea

Abstract

An increase in the crab pot fishery in the East China Sea has caused great pressure on swimming crab Portunus trituberculatus resources. Thus, it is essential to implement suitable measures to release sublegal-sized crabs to increase the number of recruits for legal-sized crabs. One of the measures considered is the installation of escape vents on crab pots. We tested crab pots with one and two escape vents and compared the catchability and size selectivity of these pots with control pots without an escape vent. Pots with one escape vent located on single side of the pot, top or bottom (SS), and another on both sides at top and bottom edges (BS) were tested in sea trial experiments following typical commercial fishing practice. The results show that both SS pots and BS pots caught significantly smaller number of sublegal-sized crabs (<116 mm carapace width, CW), but the difference in catch between the two types of crab pots is not significant. The 50% selective CWs (CW50) and the selective ranges (SRs) of both BS pots are slightly larger than those of SS pots. However, 95% confidence intervals of CW50s and SRs are overlapped, indicating that the discrepancy between them is small. Then, in a mixed effect model, the effect of locations of escape vents, taken as the fixed effect, on selectivity parameters and indexes was analyzed by hypothesis testing. The results show that null hypothesis of no effect of location of vents on size selectivity cannot be rejected, indicating that there is no significant difference in size selectivity between the two types of pots for P. trituberculatus.

Keywords

• Crab pots
• Portunus trituberculatus
• Escape vents
• Retention
• Size selection
• Location