Evaluating species at risk in data-limited fisheries: A productivity–susceptibility analysis for marine aquarium fish

The marine aquarium trade (MAT) is a significant global industry harvesting millions of wild-caught, live coral reef fishes for public and private aquaria markets in the United States and Europe annually, while supporting fisher livelihoods in the Indo-Pacific. This diverse and species-rich trade is considered data-limited, creating barriers to quantifying the current and future socio-ecological sustainability of the fishery. We present a revised and expanded productivity–susceptibility analysis (PSA) that serves as a holistic risk assessment to estimate the vulnerability of marine aquarium fish to overfishing. Our global analysis includes 306 species that are actively in trade. Improvements to the PSA framework from previous research including novel susceptibility factors, methods to overcome missing data for individual species factors, and assessing a large, diverse group of marine fish under a single, targeted assessment framework. Our results show that an overwhelming 81.4% of species evaluated fall into the least or moderately vulnerable classification, while the remaining species (n = 57) have higher vulnerability scores designating them as high priority for localized assessment and management initiatives. Most teleost fish in the trade are considered sustainable, while eels and elasmobranchs have the highest vulnerability scores. A comparative case study between our PSA and the popular FishBase vulnerability tool illustrates how the latter can be ill-suited to handle the data limitations common to nonfood fishes. Our study demonstrates how the PSA is a robust, data-limited fishery assessment to prioritize species in the MAT for further assessment, monitoring, and management.