Assessing small pelagic fish trends in space and time using piscivore stomach contents

Abstract

Changing distribution and abundance of small pelagic fishes may drive changes in predator distributions, affecting predator availability to fisheries and surveys. However, small pelagics are difficult to survey directly, so we developed a novel method of assessing the aggregate abundance of 21 small pelagic forage taxa via predator stomach contents. We used stomach contents collected from 22 piscivore species captured by multiple bottom trawl surveys within a Vector Autoregressive Spatio-Temporal (VAST) model to assess trends of small pelagics on the Northeast US shelf. The goal was to develop a spatial “forage index” to inform survey and/or fishery availability in the western North Atlantic bluefish (*Pomatomus saltatrix*) stock assessment. This spatially-resolved index compared favorably with more traditional design-based survey biomass indices for forage species well sampled by surveys. However, our stomach contents-based index better represented smaller unmanaged forage species that surveys are not designed to capture. The stomach-based forage index helped explain bluefish availability to the recreational fishery for stock assessment, and provided insight into pelagic forage trends throughout the regional ecosystem.