Abstract

Current fisheries management attempts to regulate exploitation to preserve stock attributes and sustain yield.  After a century of experience, fisheries management has usually performed indifferently or has outright failed to prevent overfishing.  Difficulties can be divided into two areas: (1) human, which concerns why management entities do not work well, and (2) ecological, which concerns monitoring and strategies responding to ecosystem conditions.  Public management institutions are structured to serve the interests of stakeholders (not ecosystems) and regulate in behalf of sustained yield/effort (not production).  This sets up contradictory socioeconomic forces and typically results in such problems as stock collapse, local extinctions, loss of biodiversity, habitat damage, assigning public resources to private interests, and allocation schemes that backfire.  Indeed, management will aid and abet overfishing.  On the biological side, management presupposes some assessment of stock status with respect to measurable demographic attributes.  The ecological realities are that wild populations grow, decline, and move at multiple and disconnected scales, changing in response to chaotic climatic and biological processes.  The very concept of stock, a black box filled by recruitment and growth, and emptied by predation and fishing is naïve.  Subtle processes like migration pathway learning, sexual facilitation, fecundity/age interactions, predator/prey changes with ontogeny, ontogenetic habitat shifts and dependencies, etc. may significantly affect stock attributes, but these are easily overlooked.  This suggests monitoring is inherently a flawed process and an overly costly challenge when (the illusion of) precision is required.  The implications are that 1) management must be independent of stakeholder interests and 2) stocks should be exploited cautiously and in a manner tailored to monitoring capability.  We must experiment with new management entities, where ecosystem health and sustained production are institutional goals.  Monitoring, though imperfect, must be conducted to track ecosystem change, i.e., to assess cleverly following Mother Nature, not a handbook.

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