The Omani sandfish sea cucumber, Holothuria scabra Jaeger, 1833 (Holothuroidea: Holothuriidae): Fishery, length-Weight relationship and condition factor

The fishery of Omani sea cucumber, Holothuria scabra , is limited so far to the Mahout Bay in Al Wusta governorate. This fishery supports an uncertain number of fishermen ranging from 100 to 150. This fishery is not well-studied and has no current management program. In order to prepare a management strategy, the government has suspended this fishery for 2 years from March 2018 to March 2021. Apart from presenting a thorough review on the sea cucumber fishery in Oman, the current work presents a detailed analysis of the length–weight relationship, sex ratio, and condition factor of the H. scabra collected from four different areas during the period February-May 2019. Based on the results, the females were longer than males, that is 226±33.4 and 221±37.8 mm, respectively. The overall sex ratio of the entire/pooled sample was 0.49 which was not different from the anticipated theoretical sex ratio of 0.5. The mean K n and the empirical weight–length equations for the total sample were between 0.12±0.01 and 1.0±0.16, and W =0.03L 1.6 , respectively.