Harvest and Mercury Levels of Striped Bass in Miramichi River, New Brunswick, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Striped Bass Morone saxatilis is an apex predator that supports recreational, commercial, and First Nations traditional fisheries in the Miramichi River, New Brunswick, Canada. Historic exploitation resulted in steep population declines, forcing a complete fisheries moratorium in 2000. After 13 years of recovery, a recreational fishery was reopened (May 2013) followed by a commercial fishery in 2018. These new opportunities for harvesting raised concerns about mercury levels in fish for human consumption as past levels have exceeded Health Canada guidelines of 0.5 mg/kg. We collected Striped Bass from the northwest Miramichi River in spring during the main recreational and commercial fishing seasons. Fish in the legal harvest slot for the recreational (50–65 cm TL) and commercial (50–80 cm TL) fisheries had total mercury in muscle tissue ranging from 0.08 to 0.43 mg/kg and from 0.08 to 0.63 mg/kg wet weight, respectively. Mercury levels in Striped Bass have decreased since the 1990s, but some individuals were close to or exceeded consumption guidelines. In addition, a preliminary angler creel survey revealed that only 8% of anglers retained their legal, three-fish limit (average harvest = 0.7 fish/angler/day). However, harvest of oversized fish was observed (11%), and a removal of ˜100,000 adults in the first month of the fishery by the recreational, commercial, and Indigenous fisheries is possible and represents a significant portion of the estimated adult population. We conclude that effective management of the Striped Bass fishery in the Miramichi River will require continued and more detailed angler surveys and population size and structure assessments accompanied by communication of current mercury levels in this species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".