Onshore biological sampling of landings by species and size category within auction sites can be more efficient than trip-based concurrent sampling

Since 1996, the European Union has required that fishery products of 35 fish species or groups of species, including crustaceans and cephalopods, be graded before being landed on the basis of commercial size-categories. A multi-stage sampling scheme to estimate catch-at-length and catch-at-age compositions of total annual landings has been conducted in Portuguese waters since 2009. All species and their size-categories are sampled concurrently from random trips within representatively selected site-days annually. In an effort to improve cost-efficiency of the biological catch sampling of commercial landings in Portugal, a size- category sampling scheme was tested during 2017, taking advantage of the stratification of horse mackerel landings, induced by the mandatory grading of landings by size-category. The total number of site-days (primary sampling units), fish boxes sampled, and specimens of horse mackerel sampled for length and age across strata during the pilot study were 30%, 57%, and 12% of the sampling carried out under the standard concurrent scheme, respectively. The assignment of horse mackerel length to the six commercial size-categories was highly consistent across site-days. Our study shows that the concurrent sampling, where trips are subsampled within site-days, could miss some size-categories by chance, resulting in poor estimates of catch-at-length especially for small fish present at the market during a site-day. The size-category sampling scheme ensured subsamples of fish from all size-categories within a site-day, and achieved data on catch-at-age that are fit-for purpose at 24% of the total cost for the standard concurrent sampling. The effect of sampling designs and sample sizes on horse mackerel stock assessment outputs showed that the onshore biological sampling to estimate catch-at-age compositions for stock assessment is optimized with the size-category sampling scheme. Pilot field experiments should be carried out for selected species that evidence consistent size grading among commercial categories.