Standardising the CPUE for the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Illex argentinus</Emphasis> fishery in the Southwest Atlantic

The catch per unit effort (CPUE) is a widely used index for assessing the abundance of exploited populations in fishery management. To obtain appropriate CPUE values, it is essential to standardise catch-effort data from fisheries. This task is particularly important for squid fisheries because squid generally have a short life-span and are vulnerable to environmental variability, and thus effective fishery management should take such factors into account. In this study, we analysed unit catches of paired vessels operating under similar fishing conditions to calculate their relative fishing power (RFP) in order to standardise the CPUE of the Taiwanese fleet jigging for Illex argentinus in the Southwest Atlantic. To evaluate the appropriateness of the method, we used a logbook dataset covering eleven years (1993–2003), in which 93.5% of the total catch during the period was included. The results indicate that 98.7% of the fishing effort can be standardised according to the estimated RFP. Compared to nominal CPUE, the standardised CPUE values projected an explainable temporal pattern, indicating an increasing trend in abundance from 1995 to 1999 and a subsequent sharp plunge from 1999 to 2003. However, the RFP was not related to apparent physical factors of the vessel, such as gross tonnage or vessel length. Our evaluations suggest that the RFP method is appropriate for standardising the CPUE, so that it can serve as an abundance index that reflects the annual recruitment size of the squid fishery, because the quality of the method can potentially take possible affecting factors into account in order to satisfy the general assumptions of standardisation criteria. However, the effects of varying the settings of parameters should be carefully examined prior to applying this standardisation method to other squid fisheries.