Governance of the world’s marine fisheries is ill-adapted to sustainability. Twenty years after the expansion of exclusive economic zones over most of the continental shelves, fisheries worldwide face problems of stock depletion, declining yields and increasing conflict. Other human activities in the ocean compound the effect. What is wrong? This paper is about the internal workings of fishery ...

Implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) requires a clear conceptual and quantitative framework for assessing how different harvest options can modify benefits to ecosystem and human beneficiaries. We address this social-ecological need for Pacific salmon fisheries, which are economically valuable but intercept much of the annual pulse of nutrient subsidies that salmon prov...

Predatory interaction of marine mammals with longline fisheries is observed globally, leading to partial or complete loss of the catch and in some parts of the world to considerable financial loss. Depredation can also create additional unrecorded fishing mortality of a stock and has the potential to introduce bias to stock assessments. Here we aim to characterise depredation in the Patagonian ...

As a legacy of Namibia’s colonial past, the country inherited severely depleted fish resources at the time of independence. Today, Namibia’s fisheries are almost exclusively industrial. The hake fishery is the country’s most important fishery, which was restructured from a pre-independence foreign fishery into one that is characterized by locally based, vertically integrated fishing and process...

A brief review is presented of the structure of the Ghanaian fishing fleet, and of the changes they induced on their resource base since the 1960s. These change consist of a reduction of the biomass of longer lived fishes, particularly in shallower waters, and in conjunction with environmental fluctuation, the creation of opportunities for invasive species of fish (triggerfish Balistes caroline...