The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of the intensive commercial jigging fishery on the western winter-spring cohort of neon flying squid (Ommastrephes bartramii) in the Northwest Pacific Ocean and to estimate the exploitation status of this stock during the period 2005-2015. We applied a Bayesian hierarchical DeLury depletion model to the Chinese jigging fisheries data to estimate the stock abundance and catchability for each year, and sensitivity analysis on daily natural

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... lity (M) was conducted. The results indicated that M values had great impacts on the overall estimates of stock size. Initial annual population sizes varied from 66 to 662 million individuals with the M value of 0.003-0.01 per day during the study period. O. bartramii suffered from a certain degree of overexploitation in 2008. The proportional escapement values (M=0.003-0.01) were 8.94% to 19.82% in 2008, with an average of 13.74%, which may have led to a low abundance of O. bartramii and annual catch since 2009. As short-lived ecological opportunists, O. bartramii are extremely sensitive to changes in multi-scale environmental conditions, especially when anomalous environmental conditions occur, and significant between-year variations in the initial abundance resulted in O. bartramii suffering from a certain degree of overexploitation in 2010. Although the proportional escapement met the management target of 40% from 2011 to 2015, the stock size and annual catch still fluctuated at relatively low levels. Improved knowledge of the influences of environmental conditions on abundance of the western winter-spring cohort of neon flying squid can contribute to the sustainable management of this stock.