304 
Fishery Bulletin 108(3) 
for q is replaced with an informative prior will reduce 
uncertainty concerning the status of the population 
and allow fisheries managers to apply harvest-control 
measures with less uncertain consequences. With our 
application, less pessimistic and less imprecise assess- 
ment results could lower the risk of implementing stock 
rebuilding policies that would cause unnecessary hard- 
ship on the fishing industry, and larger harvests could 
be taken with greater confidence that they would be 
sustainable. 
Acknowledgments 
A. Punt, T. Carruthers, and two anonymous reviewers 
are thanked for their comments on earlier drafts of this 
article. The authors thank the twelve commercial fishing 
captains for the time and effort that they provided to 
quantify factors impacting trawl catchability. M. Wilkins 
of the U.S. NOAA-NMFS provided data from the U.S. 
triennial survey. 
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