Living Resources Problems of Tropical Inshore Fisheries: Fishery Research on Tropical Soft-Bottom Communities and the Evolution of Its Conceptual Basel

Tropical soft-bottom communities-complex associations of fish and invertebrates living on the smooth Continental Shelf areas between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn-are both a marine ecologist's dream and a nightmare. They are a dream because their wide variety of species adaptations and lifehistory str.Hegies implies myriads of possible interactions and allows the foundation of large numbers of hypotheses about them, just as in the case of tropical rain forests.:! They are a nightmare because testing such hypotheses, besides being intrinsically difficult (more so, because of the watery medium, than in the case of tropical rdin forests), generally requires daGt, such as long time series of species abundances, that usually do not exist.:! Dream or nightmare, however, ecologists must wake up to the fact that. tropical soft-bottom communities, being eminently trawlable. are, throughout most of the world, highly exploited resources. In fact, trawl fisheries based on these communities have in the last 25 years not only gone through an ex-