Size selectivity of trammel nets in southern European small-scale fisheries

Trammel net size selectivity was studied for the most important metiers in four southern European areas: the Cantabrian Sea (Atlantic, Basque Country, Spain), the Algarve (Atlantic, southern Portugal), the Gulf of Cadiz (Atlantic, Spain) and the Cyclades Islands (Mediterranean, Aegean Sea, Greece). These metiers were: cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) and soles (Solea senegalensis, Microchirus azevia, Synaptura lusitanica) in the Algarve and the Gulf of Cadiz, sole (Solea solea) in the Cantabrian Sea and mixed fin-fish in the Cyclades. In each area, experimental trammel nets of six different types (combinations of two large outer panel mesh sizes and three small inner panel meshes) were constructed. Fishing trials were carried out on a seasonal basis (four seasons in the Cantabrian Sea, Algarve and Cyclades and two seasons in the Gulf of Cadiz) with chartered commercial fishing vessels. Overall, size selectivity was estimated for 17 out of 28 species for which sufficient data were available. Trammel nets generally caught a wide size range of the most important species, with length frequency distributions that were skewed to the right and/or bi-modal. In many cases the length frequency distributions of the different nets were highly overlapped. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test also showed that the large outer panel meshes generally had no effect in terms of size selectivity, while the opposite was true for the small inner panel ones. Six different selectivity models (normal scale, normal location, gamma, log-normal, bi-modal and gamma semi-Wileman) were fitted to data for the most abundant species in the four areas. For fish, the bi-modal model provided the best fits for the majority of the data sets, with the uni-modal models giving poor fits in most cases. For Sepia officinalis, where trammelling or pocketing was the method of capture in 100% of the cases, the logistic model fitted by maximum likelihood was judged to be more appropriate for describing the size selective properties of the trammel nets. Our results, which are among the first ones on trammel net selectivity in European waters, will be useful for evaluating the impacts of competing gear for the socio-economically important small-scale static gear fisheries. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.