At its 2011 meeting, the Scientific Committee agreed that a time series of relative recruitments from a well-designed survey could be a useful input into the Ross Sea stock assessment model and endorsed a proposal to carry out this work once the fishery had closed at the end of the 2011/12 season. The first survey was successfully completed in February 2012 and the results presented to the 2012 meeting of WG-SAM (Hanchet al. 2012). In this paper we provide a proposal to continue this time series.
The objectives of this second survey of the time series are as follows:
(i) To carry out the second of a time series of longline surveys to monitor pre-recruit (<110 cm TL) toothfish in the southern Ross Sea (strata A12–C12) using standardised gear in a standardised manner; and
(ii) To define additional experimental stations in adjacent areas to identify areas of high pre-recruit abundance which could be included as additional strata in future annual surveys.