Hunting hoki in Cook Strait: the 2002 winter survey
Science Centres: Fisheries
Voyage leader Richard O’Driscoll expressed considerable satisfaction with the cooperation of the weather and the acoustic survey equipment in reaching a successful conclusion to the 2002 winter survey of hoki in Cook Strait.
Echogram of hoki schools and spiny dogfish in Cook Strait Canyon, 16 August 2002.
A number of acoustic surveys of spawning hoki in Cook Strait have provided relative abundance indices for input to the stock assessment process. The 2002 survey carried out for the Ministry of Fisheries was completed with nine “snapshots” in the canyons of the Cook Strait area. This was the tenth survey in this time series.
The survey includes areas which are not usually fished by the fleet, and, along with the acoustic data collection, there is some trawling to obtain biological information and data on the length frequency of fish in the region. The spawning season for hoki in Cook Strait typically lasts for more than 2 months. As a result, the series of snapshots over a 40 day period aimed to cover the possible turnover of fish on the grounds because there is no one time at which all of the spawning fish are available to be surveyed.
The survey seems to have been timed well, indicating a build-up and then a decline in distribution and density of hoki marks in the Cook Strait Canyon. Strong hoki marks were also observed in the Narrows Basin.