Data from: Is barotrauma an important factor in the discard mortality of yellow perch?

In physoclistous fishes, barotrauma caused by rapid decompression during
capture may be an important source of fishing mortality that is
unquantified for some fisheries. We developed a predictive logistic model
for barotrauma incidence in Yellow Perch Perca flavescens and applied this
model to Ohio's recreational and commercial fisheries in Lake Erie
where discard mortality is implicitly considered to be negligible in
current stock assessment. As expected, most of the variation in incidence
was explained by capture depth with comparatively small effects of season,
sex, and size categories. Measurements of whole body and gonad density
provided limited explanation for the categorical effects. Both fisheries
spanned a range of depths (7.6 to 16.8 m) that corresponded to a broad
range of barotrauma incidence (13 to 74%). Using a recent example, we
estimated that additional fishing mortality due to barotrauma in discards
was approximately six-fold higher in the commercial than recreational
fishery. Overall, this additional mortality was <1% of lake wide
population size estimates. Thus, the assumption that all discarded Yellow
Perch survive is unlikely to result in a detectable bias in population
estimates. One caveat is that we still do not understand how strong
year-classes might influence discard mortality via increased discard rate
and barotrauma incidence for small fish.