Abstract
It is now clear that fished populations can fluctuate more than unharvested stocks. However, it is not clear why. Here we distinguish among three major competing mechanisms for this phenomenon, by using the 50-year California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) larval fish record. First, variable fishing pressure directly increases variability in exploited populations. Second, commercial fishing can decrease the average body size and age of a stock, causing the truncated population to track environmental fluctuations directly. Third, age-truncated or juvenescent populations have increasingly unstable population dynamics because of changing demographic parameters such as intrinsic growth rates. We find no evidence for the first hypothesis, limited evidence for the second and strong evidence for the third. Therefore, in California Current fisheries, increased temporal variability in the population does not arise from variable exploitation, nor does it reflect direct environmental tracking. More fundamentally, it arises from increased instability in dynamics. This finding has implications for resource management as an empirical example of how selective harvesting can alter the basic dynamics of exploited populations, and lead to unstable booms and busts that can precede systematic declines in stock levels.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge support from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and the Environment, the McQuown Chair Endowment in Natural Science, the Deutsche Bank – Jameson Complexity Studies Fund, the Sugihara Family Trust, National Science Council-Long-term Observation Research of the East China Sea, the Center for Marine Bioscience and Biotechnology, and a grant for Biodiversity Research of the 21st Century Center of Excellence at Kyoto University. M. Maunder, P. Hull, V. Dakos, S. Carpenter, J. Bascompte, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, E. H. van Nes, B. Brock, J. Murray, N. Yamamura and H.-H. Lee provided comments.
Author Contributions G.S., C.N.K.A, C.-h.H., R.M.M. and J.B. helped to frame the original research to investigate hypothesis 3. C.-h.H. and G.S. performed the initial S-map analysis on the CalCOFI data that verified hypothesis 3. C.N.K.A., with assistance from C.-h.H. and G.S., did the model analyses, statistical tests and the documentation of life-history results. All co-authors assisted with the evolution of the research plan and the refinement and final exposition of ideas.
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The file contains Supplementary Figures S1-S6 with Legends, Supplementary Tables S1-S4, Supplementary Discussion commenting on the generality of results to fisheries models and additional references (PDF 523 kb)
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Anderson, C., Hsieh, Ch., Sandin, S. et al. Why fishing magnifies fluctuations in fish abundance. Nature 452, 835–839 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06851
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06851
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