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Why fishing magnifies fluctuations in fish abundance

Nature volume 452, pages 835–839 (2008)Cite this article

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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Figure 1: In addition to an increased coefficient of variation 9 , exploited species (red dots) exhibit larger booms and busts than unexploited species (blue triangles) of a similar age.
Figure 2: Hypothesis 1: does variable fishing cause variability in fish stocks?
Figure 3: Discriminating between hypotheses 2 and 3.
Figure 4: Nonlinear behaviour can emerge at modest growth rates ( r ) with process noise ( εprocess).
Figure 5

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA,

    Christian N. K. Anderson, Chih-hao Hsieh, Stuart A. Sandin & George Sugihara

  2. Center for Ecological Research, Kyoto University, Hirano, 2-509-3, Otsu, 520-2113, Japan,

    Chih-hao Hsieh

  3. Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan,

    Chih-hao Hsieh

  4. Institute of Marine Environmental Chemistry and Ecology, National Taiwan Ocean University, 2, Pei-Ning Road, Keelung, 20224, Taiwan,

    Chih-hao Hsieh

  5. Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, 8604 La Jolla Shores Drive, La Jolla, California 92037, USA,

    Roger Hewitt

  6. Alaska Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, Washington 98115, USA,

    Anne Hollowed

  7. Division of Biology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London, RSM Building, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK

    John Beddington

  8. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK,

    Robert M. May

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Correspondence to George Sugihara.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

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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