Publication Date:
2022-10-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Dowd, S., Chapman, M., Koehn, L., & Hoagland, P. The economic tradeoffs and ecological impacts associated with a potential mesopelagic fishery in the California Current. Ecological Applications, 32(4), (2022): e2578, https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2578.
Description:
The ocean's mesopelagic zone (200–1000 m) remains one of the most understudied parts of the ocean despite knowledge that mesopelagic fishes are highly abundant. Apex predators from the surface waters are known to consume these fishes, constituting an important ecological interaction. Some countries have begun exploring the potential harvest of mesopelagic fishes to supply fishmeal and fish oil markets due to the high fish abundance in the mesopelagic zone compared with overfished surface waters. This study explored the economic and ecological implications of a moratorium on the harvest of mesopelagic fishes such as lanternfish off the US West Coast, one of the few areas where such resources are managed. We adapted a bioeconomic decision model to examine the tradeoffs between the values gained from a hypothetical mesopelagic fishery with the potential values lost from declines in predators of mesopelagic fishes facing a reduced prey resource. The economic rationale for a moratorium on harvesting mesopelagics was sensitive both to ecological relationships and the scale of the nonmarket values attributed to noncommercial predators. Using a California Current-based ecological simulation model, we found that most modeled predators of mesopelagic fishes increased in biomass even under high mesopelagic harvest rates, but the changes (either increases or decreases) were small, with relatively few predators responding with more than a 10% change in their biomass. While the ecological simulations implied that a commercial mesopelagic fishery might not have large biomass impacts for many species in the California Current system, there is still a need to further explore the various roles of the mesopelagic zone in the ocean.
Description:
Sally Dowd acknowledges sponsorship from the WHOI Summer Student Fellowship and the Rausser College of Natural Resources Honors Program at UC Berkeley. This project would not have been possible without the guidance provided by Kama Thieler and Carl Boettiger. Porter Hoagland acknowledges funding from the Audacious Project, a collaborative endeavor, housed at TED and the J. Seward Johnson Fund in support of the Marine Policy Center at WHOI.
Keywords:
Bioeconomic model
;
Fisheries
;
Mesopelagic fishes
;
Moratorium
;
Nonmarket value
;
Predators
;
Rpath
;
Willingness-to-pay values
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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