Evaluation of trawling disturbance on macrobenthic invertebrate communities in the Bay of Biscay, France: Abundance Biomass Comparison (ABC method)

The necessity to move from a traditional fishery management to an ecosystem approach is now acknowledged. Indicators are required to support the development of this approach. For example, community indicators have been proposed to assess the impact of fishing. We tested here the applicability of one such community indicator, the abundance-biomass comparison (ABC method), as a measure of the impact of bottom trawling (years of sampling: 2001 and 2003) on the benthic invertebrates – typically starfishes, crabs, squat lobsters, shrimps and large hard-shelled molluscs- of “Grande Vasière”, a major French fishing zone, in the Bay of Biscay. The ABC method is generally used as an impact indicator for different types of physical, biological and anthropogenic disturbances on benthic communities. This method is based on the assumption that increasing disturbance shifts communities from dominance by large-bodied species with low turnover rates toward dominance by small-bodied species with high turnover rates. At less disturbed areas the average biomass of individuals is greater than at more heavily disturbed areas. The ABC method measures this effect by comparing the ranked distributions of abundance and biomass within a given community. We applied the ABC method and compared the size structure and the species diversity at two areas exposed to moderate and high bottom trawl effort. Species diversity was lower in the most exploited area. The highly trawled area was dominated by opportunistic organisms, mainly one species of swimming crab Liocarcinus depurator, one species of squat lobster Munida rugosa and Norway lobsters Nephrops norvegicus, which are large-bodied species. Consequently, the results of the ABC method were inconsistent with the theoretical expectation for these particular macrofaunal communities and the measured levels of fishing intensity.