Chapter 15 Building Sustainable Marine Fisheries

Discussion Questions

1. Predict how people will use the oceans 100 years from now if human use of marine species for food follows the trajectory seen on land—a general shift from hunting and gathering to small-scale, shifting agriculture and then to modern food production systems. How might lessons learned from terrestrial food production be applied to develop a more sustainable food system in the marine realm?
2. Discuss the pros and cons of using the biomass of catch to assess the state of the world’s fisheries. Now discuss the pros and cons of using the mean trophic level of catch.
3. Discuss the pros and cons of marine protected areas as a strategy for conserving biodiversity. Now discuss their pros and cons in terms of ecosystem services delivered to humanity.
4. What do you think are practical options for managing the open oceans, which lie far beyond any nation’s territorial waters?

Group Projects

• Go to a local market that sells fish or shellfish and make a list of the marine and freshwater animal species being sold. Using the Internet and the library, find out which of the species on your list are farmed commercially anywhere in the world. Research how each of these species is raised, including what they are fed and where that feed comes from. Of the farmed species, which has the greatest potential for being sustainable, and why?
  
  
• Go to a local market that sells fish or shellfish and make a list of the marine and freshwater animal species being sold. Does the market you visited label these products with the nation of origin, or with any information about how they were caught or produced? Use the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch consumer guide to determine what percentage of the available seafood products is on the “Avoid” list. Compare your findings with those of your group members, and rate the various markets in terms of transparency and attention to sustainability.
  
  
• Using FAO data on global fish catches as well as data you can find anywhere on global human population over the same time period, examine trends in fish yield per capita globally. What does this plot of per capita yield imply for the future, and why?
  
  
• Go to the Ocean Health Index website and download data on the percentage change by country (select the “Annual Change” tab and then click “Download CSV”). For one of the 10 metrics that make up the ocean health index, find the five countries with the greatest improvement (greatest positive percentage change) and the five countries with the greatest declines (largest negative percentage change). Identify the countries, and develop some hypotheses on what differs between the five “big improvers” and the five “big decliners.”
  

Useful Websites

• Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations Fisheries and Aquaculture Department provides up-to-date news and data regarding the state of the world's fisheries. http://www.fao.org/fishery


• Ocean Health Index is a quantitative assessment of the ocean's ability to deliver key ecosystem services such as food provision, carbon storage, and coastal protection. Data are available for the Exclusive Economic Zone of each coastal nation and for regions of the high seas. http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/


• Sea Around Us Project provides free access to maps of global fisheries catches from 1950 to the present as well as detailed data concerning distributions, biomass, and species richness for a wide variety of marine groups. http://www.seaaroundus.org


• SeafoodWatch is a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium that provides information on a wide variety of harvested and cultivated marine species and offers advice to consumers regarding sustainable seafood choices. http://www.seafoodwatch.org/

Suggested Readings for In-class Discussion

• Branch TA, Watson R, Fulton EA, Jennings S, McGilliard CR, et al. (2010) The trophic fingerprint of marine fisheries. Nature 468: 431-435.
  
  
• Bush S, Belton B, Hall D, Vandergeest P, Murray F, et al. (2013) Certify sustainable aquaculture? Science 341: 1067-1068.
  
  
• Dulvy NK (2013) Super-sized MPAs and the marginalization of species conservation. Aquatic Conserv: Mar Freshw Ecosyst 23: 357-362.
  
  
• Hilborn R (2013) Environmental cost of conservation victories. PNAS 110: 9187. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/23/9187.short (open access)
  
  
• Jacquet J, Pauly D, Ainley D, Holt S, Dayton P, Jackson J (2010) Seafood stewardship in crisis. Nature 467: 28-29.
  
  
• McCauley DJ, Pinsky ML, Palumbi SR, Estes JA, Joyce FH, Warner RR (2015) Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean. Nature 347: 1255641.
  
  
• Smith MD, Roheim CA, Crowder LB, Halpern BS, Turnipseed M, et al. (2010) Sustainability and global seafood. Science 327: 784-786.
  
  
• White C, Costello C (2014) Close the high seas to fishing? PLoS Biol 12: e1001826. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001826 (open access)