In addition to fostering biodiversity goals, marine protected area (MPA) implementation has economic consequences for both commercial and recreational fisheries. During the implementation of the State of California (USA) Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), which mandates the creation of an MPA network in California’s state waters, the stakeholders and policymakers utilized a pair of economic ana...

Rebuilding depleted fish populations is a priority of modern fisheries management. In the U.S., strong statutory mandates extend to both the goals and process by which stocks are to be rebuilt. However, the National Standard Guidelines that govern the implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act may change to increase flexibility in rebuilding requirements. In ...

The use of marine protected areas (MPAs) as a basic management tool to limit exploitation rates in marine fisheries has been widely suggested. Models are important in predicting the consequences of management decisions and the design of monitoring programs in terms of policy goals. However, few tools are available that consider both multiple fleets and ecosystem scale dynamics. We use a new app...

A total of 4959 sea bass was tagged between 2000 and 2005 around the coasts of England, Wales, southern Ireland, and the Channel Isles to investigate whether movement patterns documented in 1987 have changed and to estimate the level of competition for sea bass between inshore and offshore fisheries. Most (54%) of the recaptures of adult bass (fish .40 cm) tagged inshore and made between May an...

IN THEIR REPORT “EFFECTS OF MARINE reserves on adjacent fisheries” (30 Nov., p. 1920), C. M. Roberts and co-authors present data indicating that fishery yields have increased in waters adjacent to marine reserves in St. Lucia and east Florida. In many developing island nations like St. Lucia in the Caribbean, fisheries are seriously overexploited, and little or no fisheries management exists. I...

Cooperative fishery management assigns management rights, formally or informally, to a group of users. Assigning rights to groups rather than individuals can be advantageous, given the shared, common-pool nature of fish stocks. Efficiency can potentially be improved by coordinating harvests over space and time, providing public good inputs, sharing information and setting quality standards. Man...

In Spain, gooseneck barnacles, “percebes,” are an overfished delicacy fetching a high market price ($50/lb). Oregon fishing communities show interest in developing a percebes market utilizing Pollicipes polymerus. We aim to inform resource managers to avoid over harvesting Oregon goosenecks. In summer 2016, we investigated the current status of P. polymerus populations with three primary object...

Let us compare a livestock farmer and a fisher. The farmer selects and breeds individuals that exhibit the most desirable characteristics. This is good practice, because it increases the prevalence of these characteristics in the next generation of the stock. In contrast, the fisher catches large, fast-growing fish, so their desirable characteristics are less likely to be passed on to the next ...

Recognizing that all management decisions have impacts on the ecosystem being exploited, an ecosystem-based approach to management seeks to better inform these decisions with knowledge of ecosystem structure, processes and functions. For marine fisheries in the California Current, along the West Coast of North America, such an approach must take into greater consideration the constantly changin...

Population genetic structure of stellate sturgeon (Acipenser stellatus) in 197 adult specimens from four fishery regions along the Iranian coastline of the southern Caspian Sea was investigated using microsatellite markers. Out of 15 microsatellite primers, 11 loci were produced, in which 10 of them were polymorphic and 1 was monomorph. Totally, 184 alleles were identified and on average 13.1 a...