Rougheye rockfish species types I and II COSEWIC assessment and status report: chapter 6

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Distribution

• Global Range
• Canadian Range

Global Range

Rougheye rockfish, Sebastes aleutianus (Jordan and Evermann 1898) are reported to range from north of Japan, through to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, the Gulf of Alaska, and the west coast of North America from British Columbia (BC) to southern California (Figure 4). Although range extends into Asian waters, records from the northwestern Pacific are poorly documented (Froese and Pauly 2005).

Figure 4: North American Distribution of Rougheye Rockfish Species Pair

Distribution adjacent to Asian countries is not well documented (Froese and Pauly 2005).

Canadian Range

Figure 5 shows the areal extent of rougheye rockfish, Sebastes aleutianus (Jordan and Evermann 1898) as inferred from commercial groundfish trawl and longline catch rates for fisheries that target this entity at depths ranging from 0 to 800 m over the period 1996 through 2004. Choice of grid cell size influences the estimation of occupied area – cell size often shows a positive correlation with inferred area of occurrence. This effect is aggravated by sparse and infrequent tow locations represented by a single point. In reality, fishing events (trawl tows and longline sets) traverse tens of kilometres, often following contours and looping back on themselves. Given this scenario, a 5 km x 5 km cell gives a reasonable approximation of a typical fishing event. At this grid cell size, the known habitat or “area of occupancy” covers at least 35 000 km². Table 1 offers a similar summary from commercial and survey logs from the trawl fishery where the estimated area of occupancy covers approximately 30 000 km² between 0 and 800 m. Due to the extent of trawl and longline sets mentioned above, the former estimate is preferred. Depth distributions from commercial data indicate that 95% of rougheye rockfish, Sebastes aleutianus (Jordan and Evermann, 1898) caught occurred between 170 and 650 m (Figure 6). Figure 7 shows all available bathymetry bounded by these depths (blue shading), giving a rough estimate of the “extent of occurrence” of 37 000 km².

Figure 5: Mean CPUE (kg/h) of rougheye rockfish species pair in 25 km² grid cells along the BC coast

The shaded cells give an approximation of the area of occupancy (35 100 km²) as determined using groundfish trawl tow and longline set data collected between 0 and 800 m from 1996 to 2005 inclusive. Source: Haigh et al. (2005).

Based on events from commercial fishing and research surveys located in 25 km² grid cells overlaid on a 1 km² ocean depth grid. Source: Haigh et al. (2005).