ENN: Contrarian fishing could mean more fish
Seattle, Washington – Managing fisheries to maximize profits got a bad name in the 1970s after an economist concluded that overexploitation, even to the point of causing a stock to go extinct, is a definite possibility when fishers are pitted against each other and are attempting to maximize profits. The seminal 1973 article in Science was not a study of how fishers actually behave but was a mathematical exercise weighing the profit advantages and disadvantages of overexploitation.
A new way of looking at maximizing fishery profits, published this week in Science, comes to a different conclusion — one that could lead fishers to buy into the idea of catching fewer fish than they are allowed under commonly used management guidelines.
That’s because when fish are abundant enough, the cost to catch each one — in terms of such things as fuel, vessel time and labor — goes down, according to Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and a co-author on the paper.
