Disturbance of the Marine Benthic Habitat by Commercial Fishing: Impacts at the Scale of the Fishery

Commercial fishing is one of the most important human impacts on the marine benthic environment. One such impact is through disturbance to benthic habitats as fishing gear (trawls and dredges) are dragged across the seafloor. While the direct effects of such an impact on benthic communities appear obvious, the magnitude of the effects has been very difficult to evaluate. Experimental fishing-disturbance studies have demonstrated changes in small areas; however, the broader scale implications attributing these changes to fishing impacts are based on long-term data and have been considered equivocal. By testing a series of a priori predictions derived from the literature (mainly results of small-scale experiments), we attempted to identify changes in benthic communities at the regional scale that could be attributed to commercial fishing. Samples along a putative gradient of fishing pressure were collected from 18 sites in the Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand. These sites varied in water depth from ;17 to 35 m and in sediment characteristics from ;1 to 48% mud and from 3 to 8.5 mg chlorophyll a/cm3. Video transects were used for counting large epifauna and grab/suction dredge and core sampling were used for collecting macrofauna. After accounting for the effects of location and sediment characteristics, 15–20% of the variability in the macrofauna community composition sampled in the cores and grab/suction dredge samples was attributed to fishing. With decreasing fishing pressure we observed increases in the density of echinoderms, longlived surface dwellers, total number of species and individuals, and the Shannon-Weiner diversity index. In addition, there were decreases in the density of deposit feeders, small opportunists, and the ratio of small to large individuals of the infaunal heart urchin, Echinocardium australe. The effects of fishing on the larger macrofauna collected from the grab/ suction dredge samples were not as clear. However, changes in the predicted direction in epifaunal density and the total number of individuals were demonstrated. As predicted, decreased fishing pressure significantly increased the density of large epifauna observed in video transects. Our data provide evidence of broad-scale changes in benthic communities that can be directly related to fishing. As these changes were identifiable over broad spatial scales they are likely to have important ramifications for ecosystem management and the development of sustainable fisheries.