Pilot research on species composition of Korean purse seine catch at cannery

A preliminary study on species composition of a Korean purse seine catch landed at cannery was conducted in April 2011. In the cannery, all tuna catch are sliding through a sorting grid panel that filters and drops fish in the buckets by size class (above 9kg, 3.4-9kg, 1.8-3.4kg, 1.4-1.8kg and below 1.4kg). In cannery processing, species sorting was made for skipjack tuna and yellowfin tuna only from catches greater than 3.4kg during filtering but not for bigeye tuna because of difficulties in species identification between bigeye tuna and yellowfin tuna under frozen state. As no species identification was carried out for catch groups less than 3.4kg in the cannery process, this study focused on sorting out skipjack tuna and yellowfin tuna from these groups and then identifying bigeye tuna from all size groups of yellowfin tuna. Using the mixture rate of species obtained from the samples taken, species composition of the landed catch was estimated. As results, cannery research showed 95% for skipjack tuna, 3% for yellowfin tuna and 2% for bigeye tuna in species composition, while vessel logbook data represented 96%, 3% and 1% for skipjack tuna, yellowfin tuna and bigeye tuna, respectively. The proportion of bigeye tuna identified in the cannery was slightly higher than shown in logbook data by 1%.