Fishing net. Photo by Bicanski, Pixnio.
If humanity wants to continue to derive healthy nutrition from wild-caught fish – as 40 per cent of the global population currently does – it is crucial that fisheries managers and marine conservationists start using the same metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of both sustainable fisheries measures and the establishment of marine protected areas.
After the collapse of herring and cod stocks in the western Baltic Sea, flatfish such as plaice, flounder, and dab now dominate the catch. However, they can’t replace the lost catch of cod and herring. Photo by Ilka Thomsen, GEOMAR.
As the abundance of global fish populations continues to deteriorate, top fisheries researchers are calling for simpler yet more accurate stock assessment models that avoid overly optimistic scientific advice, which ends up encouraging overfishing.
The Sea Around Us project manager, Dr. Maria ‘Deng’ Palomares, with Belizean fishers. Photo by the Belize Fisheries Project.
Belizean fishers’ experience in the water confirms the declining trends in fishery catches – and, therefore, in fish populations – uncovered by the Belize Fisheries Project (BFP), of which the Sea Around Us is a member together with Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI), the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative (HRI) and MRAG Americas.
Rainer Froese. Photo by the Blue Marine Foundation, Facebook.
By Rainer Froese
I thought the background story of our recent publication ‘New developments in the analysis of catch time series as the basis for fish stock assessments: The CMSY++ method‘ may be of interest to young scientists.
Fishers in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. Reference image by Rasheedhrasheed, Wikimedia Commons.
A recent update introduced to the CMSY methodology used to assess the status of fish stocks has proven to more accurately predict the catch that a population can support than highly-valued data-intensive models.
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