Natural mortality of fish: a review

This paper analyzed the scientific production on natural mortality (M) in fish, in order to understand the existing methods and identify the most commonly used ones. Research was carried out in the Web of Science database (WoS), using bibliometric and systematic analysis methods to evaluate scientific production using the following indicators: relevance of scientific journals, scientific recognition of papers, relevance of authors and co-occurrence of keywords. The bibliographic portfolio was composed of the hundred most cited papers of the WoS. The most relevant papers are reviews on the topic studied, which justifies the number of citations. The most cited researchers were the authors of the main estimators of M. The keywords of greatest occurrence were: natural mortality, growth and age. Of the total papers, only 19 estimated M for 28 species. Of these papers, 58% studied population dynamics and 42% made assessments of fish stocks. The most commonly used estimators were Hoenig (1983) and Pauly (1980b). Given the results obtained, it is important to develop more sophisticated methods, taking into account new approaches, such as temperature variation within this estimator, which was not observed in any of the methods.