A systematic review of age, growth and mortality studies in Mediterranean and Black Sea fishes

Abstract

Age, growth, and mortality studies (AGMS) conducted in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were reviewed. The main objective of this study was to find out the gaps on unstudied and less studied species. Names of the all fish species were obtained from fishbase. While the “native” and “endemic” species were taken into consideration, species “introduced”, “questionable”, “misidentified” and “error in a name” were excluded from the data set. Fishbase, semanticscholar and googlescholar were used to obtain the species related studies in June 2023. Graphs and tables were created to represent the results. Totally, 185 of 604 species have AGMS. 22 countries have investigated fish age, growth, and mortalities, and the first three countries are Türkiye, Italy, and Greece, respectively. In the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 796 AGMS were found. The top three of these families with the most species are Sparidae (177), Mullidae (87), and Mugilidae (66). Among the studied species, 86.49% of the species (160) are commercially important for fisheries, and 13.51% of the species (25) are non-commercial. 31 of the 160 species encounter existence problems. All accessible studies were used including studies’ references and it was observed that the most of the species (419) in the Mediterranean and Black Sea have no age or growth studies. This study clearly shows the gaps in AGMS in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.