'Illusion of Plenty' Masking Collapse of Two Key Southern California Fisheries

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1199

Monday, September 26, 2011

'Illusion of Plenty' Masking Collapse of Two Key Southern California Fisheries

Scripps-led study finds overfishing of spawning areas, environmental conditions behind collapse of two bass species

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

The two most important recreational fisheries off Southern California have collapsed, according to a new study led by a researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Scripps postdoctoral researcher Brad Erisman and his colleagues examined the health of regional populations of barred sand bass and kelp bass-staple catches of Southern California's recreational fishing fleet-by combining information from fishing records and other data on regional fish populations. Stocks of both species have collapsed due to a combination of overfishing of their breeding areas and changes in oceanographic conditions, the researchers found.

As they describe in the most recent edition of the http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/f2011-090">Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, the researchers say the total amount, or biomass, of each bass species decreased 90 percent since 1980. Yet fisheries catch rates have remained stable for a number of years, even as overall population sizes dropped drastically. This is due, the authors say, to a phenomenon known as "hyperstability" in which fishing targets spawning areas at which large numbers of fish congregate, leading to a misleading high catch rate and masking a decline in the overall population.

"The problem is when fish are aggregating in these huge masses, fishermen can still catch a lot each trip, so everything looks fine-but in reality the true population is declining," said Erisman, a member of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. "So as the true abundance is declining, the fisheries data used to assess the health of the fisheries are not showing that and give no indication of a collapse-this is referred to as 'the illusion of plenty.'"

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[saras]

1. This is why catch numbers simply shouldn't be used to judge population size

They've never been good indicators except in the grossest "the ocean used to be full, not we can't find any" sense.

If you don't know a fish's life cycle, you don't know how many there are. And if we don't know how much of a resource exists, we will, in general, extract it until there isn't any more.

Just because it's the only data we had available a hundred years ago doesn't mean we should keep relying on it now.