Update on IOTC Bigeye Tuna Operating Model Development October 2018

This paper summarizes progress on the development of Operating Models (OMs) for IOTC bigeye (BET) tuna. Additional background detail on recent software developments is provided in the yellowfin (YFT) companion paper (Kolody and Jumppanen 2018f). MP evaluation updates for BET and YFT are described in Kolody and Jumppanen (2018a). This paper builds on the work presented and reviewed at the IOTC informal MSE Working Group in March 2018 (Kolody and Jumppanen 2018d,e), and represents the first time that the formal IOTC WPTT and WPM have the opportunity to review the substantial BET OM developments since the phase 1 work was completed in 2016.