Stock assessment of the Australian east coast tailor (Pomatomus saltatrix) fishery

Abstract

Tailor is a highly migratory fish with an iconic, mainly beach-based fishery on the Australian east coast. There is a pronounced annual, close-inshore run of large schools of tailor from New South Wales, where the fishery peaks in April–June, to Queensland where the Fraser Island fishery at the northern end of the run peaks in August–September. The commercial sector of the fishery developed over the first half of the 20th century while the recreational beach line sector grew strongly from the late 1940s, facilitated by rapid developments in recreational beach-fishing gear.
The recreational sector appeared to have had a pronounced peak in both harvest size and fishing effort in the mid-1990s, after which both the recreational and commercial sectors experienced big falls driven largely by cultural change. Recreational participation rates and fishing effort fell sharply while fishery management implemented measures such as bag limits on the recreational sector and harvest limits and spatial restrictions on the commercial sector.
Information on the tailor fishery is relatively rich in fish length-frequency and ageing data, although data quality greatly improved from the mid-1990s with the introduction of scientific sampling methods. Prior to that time there were no reliable fish ageing data and most length-frequency data came from tagging experiments. The eastern Australian stock of tailor mainly consists of young fish with not many surviving beyond four years of age. The oldest fish aged by Fisheries Queensland’s monitoring team were just under seven years of age.