Ocean's eleven: a critical evaluation of the role of population, evolutionary and molecular genetics in the management of wild fisheries

Significant changes have occurred in the well-established partnership between fisheries managers and geneticists over the last 50 years. It is therefore timely to review and recalibrate the ways in which genetic technologies can assist the fishing industry to maintain productive and sustainable harvests. Our objective is to contribute to the mutual understanding of all stakeholders in the genetics–management partnership. Genetic technologies that are relevant to fisheries management are grouped into eleven themes, which are described in plain language for a non-specialist audience. The role that the genetic information plays in fisheries management is explained, along with an assessment of the challenges and barriers that may be preventing the uptake of the information into the fisheries management process. The compelling conclusion is that genetics offers a diverse collection of versatile and useful tools for informing fisheries managers about issues that have a biological basis. Presently, mainstream use of genetic tools focuses on a narrow set of fisheries management issues, but the diversity of genetic tools and the novel issues they can address indicates that uptake will grow, particularly as communication between geneticists and end-users improves

Choosing a fishery's governance structure using data poor methods

Multi-species fisheries are complex to manage and the ability to develop an appropriate governance structure is often seriously impeded because trading between sustainability objectives at the species level, economic objectives at the fleet level, and social objectives at the community scale, is complex. Many of these fisheries also tend to have a mix of information, with stock assessments available for some species and almost no information on other species. The fleets themselves comprise fishers from small family enterprises to large vertically integrated businesses. The Queensland trawl fishery in Australia is used as a case study for this kind of fishery. It has the added complexity that a large part of the fishery is within a World Heritage Area, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which is managed by an agency of the Australian Commonwealth Government whereas the fishery itself is managed by the Queensland State Government. A stakeholder elicitation process was used to develop social, governance, economic and ecological objectives, and then weight the relative importance of these. An expert group was used to develop different governance strawmen (or management strategies) and these were assessed by a group of industry stakeholders and experts using multi-criteria decision analysis techniques against the different objectives. One strawman clearly provided the best overall set of outcomes given the multiple objectives, but was not optimal in terms of every objective, demonstrating that even the "best" strawman may be less than perfect. © 2012

A retrospective evaluation of sustainable yields for Australia's Northern prawn fishery

The fundamental aim in fisheries management is to determine an optimal fishing effort for sustainably harvesting from a replenishable resource. The current management objective of Australia’s Northern Prawn Fishery is to maximize the long-term net economic return following Australian government policy, resulting in an average recent catch of tiger prawn species of about 1,250 tons only. However, the maximum sustainable catch stated from different studies is around 3,000– 4,700 tons. We also evaluated the net profit assuming that there was no buyback scheme in 2005 and the fishing fleet was kept at 89 vessels since 2005 and concluded that 40% more catch on average (2006–2009) and an additional total profit of A$17 million (excluding crew cost) could have been gained in addition to the many millions of dollars of savings in the buyback scheme. These findings have great implications for future management in Australia and elsewhere because there is a grave concern of overfishing worldwide

A Retrospective Evaluation of Sustainable Yields for Australia's Northern Prawn Fishery: An Alternative View

The increasing interest in maximum economic yield (MEY) as a management target has been accompanied by considerable debate as to how MEY should be determined. Different interpretations as to how economic costs are treated may lead to different outcomes. For example, a recent paper by Wang and Wang (2012b) provided a retrospective analysis of a recent buyback program in a major Australian fishery aimed at moving the fishery to MEY and concluded that greater economic benefits would have been achieved had the buyback not taken place. However, the economic assumptions underlying this result are debatable. In this article, we provide our own analysis using corrected economic parameters and suggest that, had the buyback not taken place, industry profits from 2006 to 2009 would have been $22–25 million lower. These new findings are placed in the context of the events that led to the buyback taking place and we conclude that the buyback resulted in substantial benefits to the industry.Copyright Information: © Taylor & Franci

Targeting ability and output controls in Australia's multi-species Northern Prawn Fishery

The degree to which individual species can be targeted will influence how quotas are set in multi-species fisheries managed through individual transferable quotas (ITQs). In this paper, a multi-output distance function is used to examine fishers' ability to control output mix in a fishery about to move to ITQ management. The parameters of the model are estimated using Bayesian techniques, with monotonicity and homogeneity conditions imposed to ensure theoretical consistency. The results suggest that the ability of fishers to change their output mix is relatively limited, and a single quota may be sufficient to control catches of the key species. Oxford University Press and Foundation for the European Review of Agricultural Economics 2010; all rights reserved. For permissions, please email [email protected], Oxford University Press.