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Vulnerability of marine fishes to fishing : from global overview to the northern South China Sea

University of British Columbia

Fishing has become a major conservation threat to marine fishes. Effective conservation of threatened species requires timely conservation risk assessment and formulation of socio-economically viable policies. A fuzzy logic expert system is developed to predict the intrinsic vulnerability and depletion risk of marine fishes to fishing. Firstly, the expert system predicts intrinsic vulnerability (i.e., fishes' inherent ability to withstand fishing mortality) from simple parameters of life history and ecology. Secondly, the system predicts the relative depletion risk of marine fishes from their intrinsic vulnerability and exploitation status inferred from catch time-series. These methods reveal the increasing dominance in global catches by fishes with low intrinsic vulnerability, particularly those in coral reefs. The opposite trend is observed in seamounts where species are highly vulnerable to fishing and are increasingly being exploited and serially depleted in recent years. Moreover, risk of population depletion increased greatly from the 1970s to 2000s. Among all extant marine fishes, 10 to 20% are predicted to have high depletion risk. In the northern South China Sea (NSCS), relative abundance of 15 out of the 17 studied taxa declines by over 70% in 15 years. The rate of decline is con-elated with the intrinsic vulnerability of the taxa. Using the Ecopath with Ecosim modelling approach, the structures of the NSCS ecosystem in the 1970s and 2000s are reconstructed and compared. The models show that the NSCS ecosystem has chanced from being demersal-dominated to pelagic-dominated, with a large decline in overall biomass and decrease in ecosystem maturity. Primary production is largely utilized by the fisheries compared to some 30 years ago when primary production was mainly utilized by marine fauna. The model is able to emulate the changes of observed relative abundance of commercial taxa. Using Ecosim, trade-off between conservation status (indicated by a depletion index) and economic benefits is identified as convex-shaped. The 2000s ecosystem appears sub-optimal ecologically and economically, thus improvement in conservation and economic benefits can be achieved simultaneously. However, the resulting social problems due to loss of fishing-related jobs need to be addressed first. Thus, developing viable alternative livelihoods for fishers is a priority to meet conservation and economic objectives.

Text

2011-02-14

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31272

Resource Management and Environmental Studies

University of British Columbia

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