Dynamic patterns of overexploitation in fisheries

A fishery for brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) cysts to supply the aquaculture industry considerably expanded in the late 1980s in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. With this expansion, concerns emerged in the 1990s about the fishery's sustainability, especially its impact on the abundant western North American waterbirds that use the lake and feed on brine shrimp. We track the development of management strategies using adaptive management by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR), which focused on the biology of the system and development of biology‐based harvesting models. The models and their rationale are presented, their success in forecasting is evaluated, and implications for managing the harvest and conserving waterbirds are examined. We view this as an interesting case study because it transpired over a short time in a relatively simple system. This permitted us to clearly track management from the onset of a harvest market, through realization that the harvest had to be managed in the absence of needed biological knowledge, to the adaptive development of management strategies as biological knowledge was accumulated. The outcome illustrates the success that harvest management can attain with careful monitoring of the resource and terminating the harvest when a necessary escapement stock is attained.

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“…, Perissi et al. ). The classic approach compares population numbers in the previous generation with numbers in the current generation.…”

Section: A Brine Shrimp Harvest Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A management case study for a new commercial fishery: brine shrimp harvesting in Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA

Belovsky

Perschon

2019

Ecological Applications

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“…Over-exploitation threatens the ecological sustainability of many of the world’s fisheries [ 2 ]. Ecological models aim to understand the incentives and consequences of overfishing, and suggest ecologically enlightened management strategies [ 31 , 32 ]. This may not be enough.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fisheries management as a Stackelberg Evolutionary Game: Finding an evolutionarily enlightened strategy

et al. 2021

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Fish populations subject to heavy exploitation are expected to evolve over time smaller average body sizes. We introduce Stackelberg evolutionary game theory to show how fisheries management should be adjusted to mitigate the potential negative effects of such evolutionary changes. We present the game of a fisheries manager versus a fish population, where the former adjusts the harvesting rate and the net size to maximize profit, while the latter responds by evolving the size at maturation to maximize the fitness. We analyze three strategies: i) ecologically enlightened (leading to a Nash equilibrium in game-theoretic terms); ii) evolutionarily enlightened (leading to a Stackelberg equilibrium) and iii) domestication (leading to team optimum) and the corresponding outcomes for both the fisheries manager and the fish. Domestication results in the largest size for the fish and the highest profit for the manager. With the Nash approach the manager tends to adopt a high harvesting rate and a small net size that eventually leads to smaller fish. With the Stackelberg approach the manager selects a bigger net size and scales back the harvesting rate, which lead to a bigger fish size and a higher profit. Overall, our results encourage managers to take the fish evolutionary dynamics into account. Moreover, we advocate for the use of Stackelberg evolutionary game theory as a tool for providing insights into the eco-evolutionary consequences of exploiting evolving resources.

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“…The phenomenon of overfishing has been recently studied by system dynamics in the recent work of Perissi and al. 40 revealing how overshoot is the crucial factor that leads to the destruction of the fisheries. This situation has important consequences in the fisheries economy that can be described exactly by the Tainter's concept of diminishing returns of complexities.…”

Section: Historical Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Al. 43 ). Again, we observe a qualitatively similar behaviour to the others reported before -including the typical hysteresis of the curves.…”

Section: Historical Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse: A Biophysical Examination of Tainter’s Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity

Bardi

Falsini

Perissi

2019

Biophys Econ Resour Qual

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The collapse of large social systems, often referred to as "civilizations" or "empires," is a well-known historical phenomenon, but its origins are the object of an unresolved debate. In this paper, we present a simple biophysical model which we link to the concept that societies collapse because of the "diminishing returns of complexity" proposed by Joseph Tainter 1 . Our model is based on the description of a socio-economic system as a trophic chain of energy stocks which dissipate the energy potential of the available resources. The model produces various trajectories of decline, in some cases rapid enough that they can be defined as "collapses." At the same time, we observe that the exploitation of the resource stock ("production") has a strongly nonlinear relationship with the complexity of the system, assumed to be proportional to the size of the stock termed "bureaucracy." These results provide support for Tainter's hypothesis. 1

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Dynamic patterns of overexploitation in fisheries

Abstract: Graphical abstractThe “mind-sized” model of overexploitation in fisheries is based on the concept that the fishing industry acts as the “predator” of the resource and that its growth and subsequent decline is directly related to the abundance of the fish stock.

Cited by 37 publications

References 25 publications

A management case study for a new commercial fishery: brine shrimp harvesting in Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA

A management case study for a new commercial fishery: brine shrimp harvesting in Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA

Fisheries management as a Stackelberg Evolutionary Game: Finding an evolutionarily enlightened strategy

Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse: A Biophysical Examination of Tainter’s Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity

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