Fraser River Sockeye Fisheries and Fisheries Management - Cohen ...

allocation shows "No agreement", and these catch amounts are not trivial. It is not clear how thisaffects "reliability" of in-river catch estimates, especially considering that 2004-09 reliability isconsidered "Good" (and that, according to the report, FSC catch statistics are among the leastreliable).LGL Response: Reliability is considered to be good for the period 2004-2009 because of theseparation of FSC and sales fisheries and better catch monitoring programs. We haveadded some additional text to the report to quantify the observation that reported FSCcatches tend to be larger in years without sockeye allocation agreements.It is not possible to judge "sustainability" of exploitation rates based on short time-series such asthose presented. The text on P96L24-25, i.e., "70-80% exploitation rates…appeared to besustainable in the early years", should be re-worded to, e.g., "70-80% exploitation rates…werecommon in the early years".LGL Response: The sentence has been changed to read “While 70-80% ERs are very highin recent context of low and declining productivity, the substantially higher productivity ofFraser sockeye from 1960-1980 appeared to support these higher ERs.”I don't think the interpretation made on P97L10-16 can be made either in this report, or at all.The text implies that an inadvertent over-escapement for Quesnel in 2002 caused an abnormallylow recruitment in 2006. There is no evaluation of what happened to any other stocks in 2006,nor is there any evaluation of stock-recruitment relationships to suggest whether suchobservations are consistent with past recruitment. In fact, another Cohen Commission reportexamined spawner-recruitment relationships and suggested that a Larkin model best explainedQuesnel population dynamics. This would therefore suggest that spawner abundances in yearsprior to 2002 may be equally important.LGL Response: Text on page 97 has been edited to acknowledge that the very small fall fryobserved in 2003 were likely the result of large escapements in two successive years. Smallfall fry result in small smolts that typically have lower survival than larger smolts.3. Are there additional quantitative or qualitative ways to evaluate the subject area notconsidered in this report? How could the analysis be improved?The section on "Extent of Overharvesting" could provide more specific information on potentialoverharvesting. For example, overlaying time-series of abundance and exploitation rate providesonly a qualitative indication of potential over-harvesting (i.e., abundance declines after a longM-30