Visualizing the Food-Web Effects of Fishing for Tunas in the Pacific Ocean
By J. Hinke, Isaac C. Kaplan, K. Aydin, G. Watters, R. Olson, J. Kitchell. 2004
301 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We use food-web models to develop visualizations to compare and evaluate the interactions of tuna fisheries with their supporting food webs in the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) and the central north Pacific (CNP) Oceans. In the ETP and CNP models, individual fisheries use slightly different food webs that are defined by the assemblage of targeted tuna species. Distinct energy pathways are required to support different tuna species and, consequently, the specific fisheries that target different tuna assemblages. These simulations suggest that catches of tunas, sharks, and billfishes have lowered the biomass of the upper trophic levels in both systems, whereas increases in intermediate and lower trophic level animals have accompanied the decline of top predators. Trade- offs between fishing and predation mortality rates that occur when multiple fisheries interact with their respective food webs may lead to smaller changes in biomass than if only the effect of a single fishery is considered. Historical simulations and hypothetical management scenarios further demonstrate that the effects of longline and purse seine fisheries have been strongest in upper trophic levels, but that lower trophic levels may respond more strongly to purse-seine fisheries. The apex predator guild has responded most strongly to longlining. Simulations of alternative management strategies that attempt to rebuild shark and billfish populations in each ecosystem reveal that (1) changes in longlining more effectively recover top predator populations than do changes in purse seining and (2) restrictions on both shallow-set longline gear and shark finning may do more to recover top predators than do simple reductions in fishing effort.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c425f21ba039e3f1b3fd3dd5f3c20d1ed75dc13a
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Citations in the corpus
- Does selective fishing conserve community biodiversity? Predictions from a length-based multispecies model (2011, background): “Gear technology (Jennings and Revill 2007), combinations of gears with different selectivities (Hinke et al. 2004) or spatial management approaches (Branch and Hilborn 2008, Pikitch et al.”
- Food-web inferences of stable isotope spatial patterns in copepods and yellowfin tuna in the pelagic eastern Pacific Ocean (2010, background): “This is likely due to the WCPO ecosystem model omitting the microbial loop, resulting in TP estimates about 0.5 trophic levels lower than estimates of the ETP model that contains two producer groups (see Hinke et al. (2004) for comparisons of both models).”
- Diet of young Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in eastern and western Atlantic foraging grounds (2010, background): “Any reductions in the abundance of top predators have the potential to alter food web dynamics and trophic structure in marine systems (Paine 1966; Hinke et al. 2004), while changes in the prey community can also affect marine top predators (Rosen and Trites 2000).”