Abstract

Arguments for establishing marine parks are based on the need to conserve and preserve resources, particularly those thought to be particularly rare or threatened. Efforts to establish such areas are often lead by agencies that manage terrestrial parks. Fisheries reserves are concerned with the management of exploitable resources, and efforts to establish them are typically under local fisheries agencies. At first appearance, there are two separate agencies with fundamentally different philosophies: preservation versus extraction. However, unnecessary confusion has been introduced by concentrating on a specific potential benefit of fishery reserves: enhancement of yield through capture of fishes emigration from reserve areas. While this benefit is important, particularly to fishermen, it is secondary to the more fundamental purposes of fishery reserves that are based on conservation (conserving spawning stock & biodiversity, providing control area, buffers against management failure, maintaining system integrity, diversifying benefits from the resource). Fisheries reserves cannot enhance overall catch except when two conditions are met:\i) stocks as a whole are overfished, and\ii) a core area (stock) is then conserved in order to produce fish emigrating to exploitable areas.\Thus, both marine parks and fisheries reserves have conservation as their core philosophy. In fact, a fishery reserve, being “no-take”, has a more restrictive philosophy toward conservation than many marine parks. Agencies concerned with parks and fisheries have common purpose and should unite to establish systems of closed areas. These must adhere to the general principals of representativeness, replication and connectivity, which may be applied using simple habitat mapping.

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