Evaluating Species at Risk in Data-Limited Fisheries: A Comprehensive Productivity-Susceptibility Analysis of the Most Traded Marine Aquarium Fish

Abstract

The marine aquarium trade is a significant global industry harvesting millions of live coral reef fishes annually. Wild-caught fish dominate public and private aquaria markets in the USA and Europe, supporting fisher livelihoods in the Indo-Pacific. This diverse and species-rich trade is considered data-limited, creating barriers to quantify the sustainability of this fishery to the net benefit of the coral reef socio-ecological system. We present a revised and expanded productivity-susceptibility analysis (PSA) framework to assess the vulnerability to overharvesting of the top 258 traded species, an estimated 92.5% of all import volume into the USA in 2011. Vulnerability was calculated based on various productivity and susceptibility factors, tailored to the unique life-history and fishery selectivity characteristics of the marine aquarium trade. We present novel factors that improve model accuracy, methods to overcome missing data for individual factors, and apply an improved Gaussian mixture model clustering algorithm to objectively classify species as least, moderately, or most vulnerable. Our results show that an overwhelming 85% of species evaluated fall into the least or moderately vulnerable classification, with the remaining species designated as high priority for localized assessment and management initiatives. A comparative case study between our PSA and the popular FishBase Vulnerability assessment illustrates how it is ill-suited to handle data limitations of non-food fishes. The results of our PSA, at a species and family level, provide useful information to stakeholders and serves as a robust and accessible risk assessment tool to prioritize species for management based on their vulnerability scores.