Mississippi's Shore Night Fishing Survey

The MRFSS is comprised of 2 independent but complementary surveys:

A telephone survey of households in coastal counties is used to collect effort data (number of angler trips) while a dockside intercept survey is used to collect catch information (catch per angler trip). Prior analysis of the telephone data has shown that anglers spend time fishing at night in certain states at different times of the year.

This largest proportion of night fishing in the Gulf of Mexico was observed in Mississippi. Since 1997 less than 5% of the MRFSS intercept survey interviews in the Gulf of Mexico have been collected between the hours of 9pm and 3am with only 1.8% of the interviews in Mississippi collected between 9pm and 3am. Subsequently little catch data are available on night fishing activities.

The MRFSS assumes that night fishing activities are similar to day fishing but this has never been tested in the past. The objectives of this research were to determine if catch and harvest rates of shore anglers fishing at night in Mississippi were differentfrom day time catch and harvest rates; and to produce expanded estimates of catch and harvest using night survey data for comparison with estimates generated from day sampling only.

Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission (GSMFC) personnel provided monthly sampling schedules of night survey assignments starting in January 2001.

MSDMR sent two field samplers on each night assignment for safety purposes. Samplersfollowed typical MRFSS methodology and used the same MRFSS forms as day sampling. Night samplers were instructed to probe anglers to ensure they interviewed anglers who spent the majority of their time fishing at night. Forms were delivered to GSMFC where they were entered into an electronic database for analysis. GSMFC ran error checking programs to check for problems with incorrect form coding or data entry mistakes. GSMFC provided reports detailing the fish recorded and measured by field samplers back to MSDMR for review on a monthly basis. All data corrections were processed by GSMFC and clean data were used for analysis.

purposes.

P. O. Box 726

Ocean Springs, MS 39566-0726

Phone 228-875-5912 , Fax 228-875-6604