Influence of fishing pressure and climate change on filefish catches in East China Sea

We analyzed the filefish (Navodon spp.) catches from 1976 to 2006 in the East China Sea (ECS) to investigate the influence of fishing pressure and climatic change on filefish catches in that area. Filefish catches in the ECS include the variation trend of catches caused by fishing effects and alteration of catches influenced by climate change. The former can be fitted by the Fox model, and the results show that filefish catches are significantly associated with fishing efforts (P0.01). After removing variation trend of catches caused by increasing fishing pressure, the variation of catches is significantly partial correlated with tropical cyclone impact index, sea surface temperature in the ECS, winter monsoon in the ECS and summer monsoon in the Yellow Sea (P0.03), while negatively partial correlated with tropical cyclone impact index, winter monsoon in the Yellow Sea, annual precipitation in the Yangtze River Valley and coastal region of the ECS (P0.03). The catches fitted by fishing efforts and climatic variables are significantly correlated to the actual catches in the ECS (R=0.91，P0.01), which indicates that variation of filefish catches is mainly affected by fishing pressure and climate change. Besides, according to the future climate scenario, the filefish catches will experience greater fluctuation.