Over-exploited Animal Populations

Are exploited fish populations stable?

The impact of pathogens on exploited populations of decapod crustaceans.

Several crustacean fisheries have experienced significant outbreaks of disease that have damaged their industries. Not only do fisheries suffer from direct losses to pathogens, such as disease-induced mortalities or reduced product value, but they can also incur indirect losses such as stunting, castration, and increased risk of predation. In some cases, the indirect losses can be substantial, ...

Long Range Dependence and the dynamics of Exploited fish populations

Long range dependence or long memory is a feature of many processes in the natural world, which provides important insights on the underlying mechanisms that generate the observed data. The usual tools available to characterize the phenomenon are mostly based on second order correlations. However, the long memory effects may not be evident at the level of second order correlations and may requi...

Disentangling the causes of maturation trends in exploited fish populations

Evolutionary theory predicts that selective harvesting will shift the frequency of genes for heritable traits towards those that express well-adapted phenotypes (Law 2007, this Theme Section). Applying this logic, commercial fisheries that select on the basis of size could reasonably be expected to favor the genotype for maturation at smaller sizes (and/or younger ages), given that rapidly matu...

Long-term Genetic Changes in Exploited Populations: Effects of Fishing on New Zealand Snapper