Advancing marine conservation
My research, focused on the industrial shrimp fishery in southern Gulf of California, aimed to determine whether tropical shrimp trawling is a problem for viability of incidentally captured small fish species. My first objective was to use life history information to evaluate possible impacts on four small fish species from their incidental capture. I applied …
Ban, N. C., Caldwell, I.R., Green, T.L., Morgan, S.K., O’Donnell K. & J.C. Selgrath (2009). Diverse fisheries require diverse solutions. Science 323(5912):338-339. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.323.5912.338
Project Seahorse supports environmentally and socially responsible syngnathid aquaculture. Syngnathid aquaculture has received much attention recently both as a potentially lucrative commercial venture and as a tool in the conservation of wild populations. From a conservation perspective, cultured syngnathids could serve to reduce the current exploitation rates of wild syngnathids and to meet any future …
A major mid-1980s shift in ecological structure of significant portions of the Southern Ocean was partially due to the serial depletion of fish by intensive industrial fishing, rather than solely to climate factors as previously hypothesized. Over a brief period (1969–1973), several finfish stocks were on average reduced to <50%, and finally (mid-1980s) to <20%, …
Multiple layers of political and socioeconomic pressure bear down on the fish and fishers in coral reef ecosystems, where conservation and fisheries often come into great conflict. This paper draws on conversations with members of an alliance of small-scale fishers in the central Philippines, and on their experiences, in order to explore ideas for reconciling …
We applaud DR Griffith (Front Ecol Environ 2008; 6[4]: 191–98) for addressing important fisheries management issues, but question the applicability of his solution (individual fishing quotas, IFQs) to the majority of the world’s fishing effort. Griffith’s IFQ success stories poorly represent the artisanal (small-scale) fleets that take 28–58% of global catch and employ 99% of …
Community and resource user support has often been declared as essential to achieving globally agreed targets for marine protection. Given that Indigenous Peoples in Canada have resource use rights, we engaged two Indigenous communities in British Columbia for their views on marine planning and protected areas. We developed a three-phased approach for executing our research: …
Benthic status of 28 near-shore, artisanal, coral reef fishing grounds in the central Philippines was assessed (2000–2002) together with surveys of the seahorse, Hippocampus comes. Our measures of benthic quality and seahorse densities reveal some of the most degraded coral reefs in the world. Abiotic structure dominated the fishing grounds: 69% of the benthos comprised …
Small-scale artisanal fisheries that target sedentary stocks have been largely ignored by fisheries management agencies, despite their great importance for food security and livelihoods. We characterized the fishing effort and biological parameters of one such fishery for seahorses in the central Philippines from 1996 to 1999. We found that catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) was very low, particularly …
Tropical shrimp trawling results in large amounts of highly diverse, non-target bycatch. We assessed the incidental catch of seahorses from shrimp trawls in central Vietnam to investigate the effects of fishing on an example group of small fishes that are potentially vulnerable and economically important. We used logbooks and catch landings surveys to quantify seahorse …