By Julia Mason, Nereus Program fellow at Stanford University
There’s a tendency among conservation scientists to attribute the world’s environmental crises to the growing global population. Fisheries science is no exception—the issue of overfishing is often condensed to one of “too many fishers chasing too few fish,” leading to inevitable fisheries declines.
The Western & Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) held an Intercessional Meeting, from August 22 to 24 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaii, for negotiations for the conservation and management of highly migratory fish stocks. Nereus Principal Investigator Quentin Hanich (University of Wollongong) was in attendance with new Nereus Fellow Katy Seto, who joined the Nereus network in September 2017 after completing her doctoral degree at University of California at Berkeley.
Climate change is expected to have many impacts on the oceans; one of them is where fish are located in the ocean. Ocean warming is expected to cause fish to shift to different locations that are cooler — generally toward the poles and into deeper waters. But not all fish are moving in the same directions and at the same speeds. This is changing what fish are eating and who are eating them.
Pacific bluefin tuna are in trouble — they’re at just 2.6% of historic, pre-fishing levels. They have been overfished and this overfishing is still continuing. Due to this dire situation, proper management of the stocks is increasingly important, yet information of the fish’s life history and migration patterns is limited.
Any trip to an aquarium or seafood market reveals the incredible variety of fishes. These fishes not only differ in how they look, but in traits related to life history. Life history traits include maximum body size, longevity, age at maturity, and fecundity – the number of eggs produced. Fishes that have the same phylogeny, or evolutionary history, share similar traits. Conversely, unrelated fishes occasionally evolve similar traits independently.
Caddell delivered his presentation — “After the Thaw: Ice Retreat and the Emerging Regulation of Newly Exposed Marine Areas” — during the first session of the conference. He discussed Antarctic ice shelves, anthropogenic activities and management, as well as future issues with thawing land areas and collaboration on these issues between the Antarctic and Arctic.
On March 16, the Nereus Program hosted the last lecture of its 2016/2017 UBC Green College Seminar series with guest speaker Douglas McCauley, Assistant Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. His talk, entitled “Managing Marine Wildlife: The Extinction of Fauna in the Ocean” looked at the differences between extinctions on land and in the oceans.
Variations in climate lead to fluctuations and changes in fish stocks; they can have effects on such things as fish behaviour, distributions and growth. Because of this, fisheries management has to respond dynamically to these fluctuations. If management decisions are made primarily on past patterns, the negative impacts can be exacerbated, especially with climate change.
The study “Biogeochemical regions of the Mediterranean Sea: an objective multidimensional and multivariate environmental approach” was recently published in Progress in Oceanography with Nereus Fellow Gabriel Reygondeau (UBC) as the lead author. In the paper, a biogeochemical/ecological spatial framework was defined for ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea.
In his newly published chapter “Wilderness protection in Estonia“, Richard Caddell, Nereus Fellow at Utrecht University, uses Estonia as a case study for European wilderness management. Estonia, Caddell writes, “has proved to be a nature conservation actor of understated significance”. Since the 13th century, Estonia has created protected wildlife areas, with little human intrusion, and has some of the most stringent legal controls over these areas in the EU.
