Temporal hooking variability among sharks on south-eastern Australian demersal longlines and implications for their management

An experiment was done to quantify species-specific variation in temporal hooking rates from demersal longlines targeting various carcharhinids off south eastern Australia, with a view to reducing the incidental catches of protected species, including the scalloped hammerhead Sphyrna lewini, great hammerhead Sphyrna mokarran and grey nurse Carcharias taurus. The longline comprised a 9600 m mainline, separated into four sections (termed lines) each with 120 gangions (20 m apart) rigged with hook timers and 16/0 circle hooks baited with either sea mullet Mugil cephalus or eastern Australian salmon Arripis trutta. The mainline was deployed on each of 17 nights (between 19:30 and 23:30 h), with two lines retrieved after 7 and 14 h respectively. From a total of 8160 hooks, 246 timers were activated without hooking fish. Twenty-two species comprising 684 individuals were caught, including 52 S. lewini, 12 C. taurus, 11 S. mokarran and 1 loggerhead turtle Caretta caretta. Several environmental factors, including water temperature, moon phase and depth had mostly homogeneous, positive effects on catches. The only identified variables that might be used to considerably reduce the catches of Sphyrna were soak time and/or diurnal gear retrieval, with most individuals hooked during daylight. Simply mandating shorter deployments and within nocturnal retrieval might limit exploitation, especially among juveniles ( < 150 cm total length). For the studied fishery to approach sustainability, future research is required to investigate other gear modifications for improving size and species selectivity, and/or operational procedures for mitigating discard and escape mortalities.