LAUSR

Minimum length limits are used to manage Dolphinfish Coryphaena hippurus in the U.S. South Atlantic, but rates of discard mortality are unknown for this fishery and others throughout the species’ worldwide range. We estimated discard mortality for Dolphinfish in the U.S. South Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico recreational hook-andline fishery by using conventional tag–recapture data. Overall, 4,648 Dolphinfish were tagged in these areas between 2002 and 2018 through the efforts of cooperating (fishery-dependent) taggers as well as research scientists who employed gear types and fishing styles representative of the recreational fishery for this species. The condition of each tagged and released fish was classified as good or poor depending on hook trauma, bleeding, and postrelease swimming behavior. Numbers of tagged and recaptured fish in each release condition were used to estimate conditionspecific discard mortality by fitting a relative risk model. The model assumption of 100% survival of fish in good condition was scaled downward by using numbers of dying fish in good condition from tank holding and satellite tagging experiments. An overall median rate of discard mortality (0.248; 95% credible interval= 0.053–0.389) for the fishery was estimated by summing the products of each condition-specific mortality rate and the proportion released in each condition. Given relatively high discard mortality rates (>20%), the results suggest that alternative management strategies (e.g., mandatory retention of hook-traumatized individuals contributing to a bag limit, regardless of size), educating fishers on the use of alternative gear types (e.g., circle hooks), modifying fishing practices (e.g., trolling with heavy drags to reduce rates of deep hooking), or a combination thereof may be more effective solutions than minimum size or bag limits to control the rates of fishing mortality for Dolphinfish. Recreational harvest represents an increasingly greater proportion of the take in a variety of fisheries around the world (Cooke and Cowx 2004, 2007). Along with a global increase in recreational landings (Cooke and Schramm 2007), the number of dead discards in recreational fisheries has also increased (Davis 2002). Discarding in recreational *Corresponding author: [email protected] Received January 11, 2019; accepted August 9, 2019 North American Journal of Fisheries Management © 2019 American Fisheries Society ISSN: 0275-5947 print / 1548-8675 online DOI: 10.1002/nafm.10348