ALBERT

Description: Heino, M., Baulier, L., Boukal, D. S., Ernande, B., Johnston, F. D., Mollet, F. M., Pardoe, H., Therkildsen, N. O., Uusi-Heikkilä, S., Vainikka, A., Arlinghaus, R., Dankel, D. J., Dunlop, E. S., Eikeset, A. M., Enberg, K., Engelhard G. H., Jørgensen, C., Laugen, A. T., Matsumura, S., Nusslé, S., Urbach, D., Whitlock, R., Rijnsdorp, A. D., and Dieckmann, U. 2013. Can fisheries-induced evolution shift reference points for fisheries management? – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 70: 707–721. Biological reference points are important tools for fisheries management. Reference points are not static, but may change when a population's environment or the population itself changes. Fisheries-induced evolution is one mechanism that can alter population characteristics, leading to "shifting" reference points by modifying the underlying biological processes or by changing the perception of a fishery system. The former causes changes in "true" reference points, whereas the latter is caused by changes in the yardsticks used to quantify a system's status. Unaccounted shifts of either kind imply that reference points gradually lose their intended meaning. This can lead to increased precaution, which is safe, but potentially costly. Shifts can also occur in more perilous directions, such that actual risks are greater than anticipated. Our qualitative analysis suggests that all commonly used reference points are susceptible to shifting through fisheries-induced evolution, including the limit and "precautionary" reference points for spawning-stock biomass, B lim and B pa , and the target reference point for fishing mortality, F 0.1 . Our findings call for increased awareness of fisheries-induced changes and highlight the value of always basing reference points on adequately updated information, to capture all changes in the biological processes that drive fish population dynamics.

Description: Reid, D. G., Graham, N., Rihan, D. J., Kelly, E., Gatt, I. R., Griffin, F., Gerritsen, H. D., and Kynoch, R. J. 2011. Do big boats tow big nets? – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 68: 1663–1669. Fishing vessel capacity for trawlers is generally expressed in terms of length, tonnage, and engine power, assuming that a larger vessel has a greater fishing power. Management uses effort-control measures such as kW-day limits based on this assumption. Many studies have shown a weak and noisy relationship between effort and modelled catches, and explanatory models often require the inclusion of a skipper or vessel effect to explain the variance. A key element in this effect is the choice of gear size. Relationships are investigated between metrics of the vessel (length, tonnage, and power) and the gear towed (length of groundgear, or circumference of the net opening) in Scottish and Irish whitefish, Nephrops , and pelagic otter trawlers. Often, the vessel size did not correlate with that of the gear, or did so only for smaller vessels (〈1000 hp). The key implication is that effort management based on vessel metrics alone is not appropriate, because it is a poor predictor for gear size, and hence for fishing power. Effort restrictions may actually encourage the adoption of larger gears for a given vessel, to maximize the value of a limited-time resource.

Description: Agnew, D. J., Gutiérrez, N. L., Stern-Pirlot, A., and Hoggarth, D. D. 2014. The MSC experience: developing an operational certification standard and a market incentive to improve fishery sustainability. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 71: 216–225. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard for sustainable fisheries is represented by three high-level principles and a set of 31 indicators and scoring guidelines, known as the "default assessment tree". Over the 14 years, since it was developed in 1999, the MSC has faced the challenge of maintaining its standard at the level of global best practice, keeping up with developments in the science and management of fisheries, and making sure that certified fisheries maintain their performance at that standard, or raise it where they fall below it. The MSC has had to regularly and widely engage with multiple stakeholders to ensure that its policy development is consistent with stakeholder expectations. Although many fisheries have made significant improvements to their performance, sometimes performance has declined, leading to further requirements for improvement. The MSC needed to design a program that balances credibility, accessibility, and improvement to move the world's fisheries towards sustainability.

Description: Due to unregulated blast fishing and episodic bleaching events, the back-reef zone near Barangay Lucero in Bolinao, Pangasinan, Philippines, was reduced to a barren area of unconsolidated sand and coral rubble. Anecdotal accounts from local inhabitants, scientific reports, and examination of rubble on the substratum revealed that the area had been dominated by staghorn Acropora corals prior to degradation. With no significant signs of natural recovery, a low-tech restoration method that is both transferable to the community and cost-effective was devised and implemented. Through the help of local inhabitants, 450 fragments of two staghorn coral species ( Acropora intermedia and A. pulchra ) were transplanted, without using SCUBA equipment, in a total of six 4 x 4 m plots. There were two transplant density treatments: low and high, receiving 25 and 50 fragments of each coral species, respectively. Survivorship and growth of transplants, as well as the assemblage of fishes and macroinvertebrates inside the transplantation and control plots, were monitored periodically for up to 19 months. Transplant survivorship was generally high (68–89%) at the end of the study. There was also an average of a 15-fold increase in ecological volume of the transplants (from 1784.25 ± 162.75 to 26 540.765 ± 4547.25 cm 3 ). Consequently, a significantly higher number of fish and of macroinvertebrates was recorded inside the transplantation plots than in the control plots, indicating signs of restoration success with the reintroduction of the two coral species. Exhibiting significant differences in coral cover, fish biomass and abundance, high-density is more cost-effective than low-density treatment, attaining optimal effects on key reef recovery parameters. The total cost of restoring a thicket of Acropora in a sandy-rubble field using this low-tech rehabilitation method with community participation was estimated to be US$9198.40 ha –1 (US$0.90 m –2 ), and thus ~60% cheaper than without community involvement. Community involvement not only reduced the cost of the restoration activity but also provided the community with a sense of ownership and responsibility for their resources, thus ensuring the long-term success of the intervention.

Description: Skagen, D. W., Skern-Mauritzen, M., Dankel, D., Enberg, K., Kjesbu, O. S., and Nash, R. D. M. 2013. A simulation framework for evaluating fisheries management decisions using environmental information. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 70: 743–754. The population dynamics of marine fish stocks are influenced by both physical and biological conditions. Yet, such environmental impacts on stock dynamics, and hence stock production, are rarely included in applied fisheries management. To test the utility of taking ecosystem information into account in management decisions requires efficient tools. We propose a simulation framework for evaluating fisheries management schemes that use environmental information as part of the decision basis. A key feature is to link environmental signals to parameters in functions that define the population dynamics. This allows a direct incorporation of environmental drivers into models of population dynamic processes and emphasizes the need for a quantitative understanding of the influence of environmental drivers on such processes. The utility of the simulation framework is demonstrated through a worked example with different management scenarios, where decisions to increase or decrease the exploitation rely on environmental indicators only, or also on information on stock abundance. In this example, a management that was based on indicators only, without updated measures of the state of the stock itself, failed to respond adequately to changes in stock productivity.

Description: Hernandez, K. M., Risch, D., Cholewiak, D. M., Dean, M. J., Hatch, L. T., Hoffman, W. S., Rice, A. N., Zemeckis, D., and Van Parijs, S. M. 2013. Acoustic monitoring of Atlantic cod ( Gadus morhua ) in Massachusetts Bay: implications for management and conservation. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 70: 628–635. Atlantic cod ( Gadus morhua ) stocks in northeastern US waters are depleted and stock recovery has been slow; research into the spawning behaviour of this species can help inform conservation and management measures. Male cod produce low-frequency grunts during courtship and spawning. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) offers a different perspective from which to investigate the occurrence, spatial extent and duration of spawning cod aggregations. A marine autonomous recording unit was deployed in the "Spring Cod Conservation Zone" (SCCZ) located in Massachusetts Bay, western Atlantic, to record cod grunts from April–June 2011. Cod grunts were present on 98.67% of the recording days ( n = 75 days). They occurred across all 24 h, although significantly more grunts were found during the day than night-time ( p = 0.0065). Grunt durations ranged from 57–360 ms, and the fundamental frequency and second harmonic had mean peak frequencies of 49.7 ± 5.6 and 102.9 Hz ± 10.9 sd, respectively. Cod grunt rates were low compared with those reported for other spawning fish, and may be indicative of diel movement patterns. Next steps will focus on expanding PAM coverage within the SCCZ, alongside prospecting for unknown spawning grounds within existing archival data.

Description: Agnew, D. J., Gutiérrez, N. L., Stern-Pirlot, A., and Hoggarth, D. D. 2014. The MSC experience: developing an operational certification standard and a market incentive to improve fishery sustainability. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 71: 216–225. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard for sustainable fisheries is represented by three high-level principles and a set of 31 indicators and scoring guidelines, known as the “default assessment tree”. Over the 14 years, since it was developed in 1999, the MSC has faced the challenge of maintaining its standard at the level of global best practice, keeping up with developments in the science and management of fisheries, and making sure that certified fisheries maintain their performance at that standard, or raise it where they fall below it. The MSC has had to regularly and widely engage with multiple stakeholders to ensure that its policy development is consistent with stakeholder expectations. Although many fisheries have made significant improvements to their performance, sometimes performance has declined, leading to further requirements for improvement. The MSC needed to design a program that balances credibility, accessibility, and improvement to move the world's fisheries towards sustainability.

Description: For more than a century, scientists have used mark-recapture techniques to describe the spatial dynamics of marine demersal fish species in the North Sea. Although such experiments have provided extensive data sets, the information is limited to the date and position at release and at recapture. Furthermore, these data may be biased due to the distribution of fishing effort. Recently, electronic (archival) data storage tags (DSTs) have successfully been used to reconstruct the movements of free-ranging demersal fish between release and recapture. Data from DST experiments allow the calculation of fisheries-independent migration parameters, and thereby provide a means of evaluating conventional tagging data. We compared the migration patterns of North Sea plaice (Pleuronectes platessa L.) as inferred from a database of twentieth century conventional tagging experiments (CT), with data from 132 plaice tagged with DST. In general, the CT experiments allowed a reliable interpretation of migration patterns, although for certain release areas the migration distances were biased due to the heterogeneous distribution of fishing effort.

Description: McLeay, L. J., Page, B., Goldsworthy, S. D., Ward, T. M., Paton, D. C., Waterman, M., and Murray, M. D. 2009. Demographic and morphological responses to prey depletion in a crested tern (Sterna bergii) population: can fish mortality events highlight performance indicators for fisheries management? – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 237–247. Disease-related mortality events in 1995 and 1998, which killed ∼70% of adult sardine (Sardinops sagax) biomass, provided an opportunity to assess whether crested tern (Sterna bergii) populations were affected by decreased prey abundance. We investigated the diet, age structure, and morphology of a population of crested terns to determine whether survival and growth were reduced for cohorts reared in years immediately following sardine mortality events. The diet of chicks and adults differed significantly. Australian anchovy (Engraulis australis) and sardine were the dominant prey in the diets of chicks, constituting an average of 36.3 and 14.6% of individual prey items, respectively. Degens leatherjacket (Thamnoconus degeni) dominated the prey of adult terns, an average of 51.9% of individual prey items. Age-specific information collected from banded adults indicated that the cohort reared after the first sardine mortality event in 1995 exhibited significantly lower rates of recruitment to the breeding colony than as predicted by life-table analyses, suggesting that survival was reduced in response to the absence of sardine. Females from cohorts reared