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The Effects of Fishing on Marine Ecosystems
Jennings, S | Kaiser, MJ
Advances in Marine Biology [Adv. Mar. Biol.]. Vol. 34, pp.
201-352. 1998.
We review the effects of fishing on benthic fauna, habitat,
diversity, community structure and trophic interactions in
tropical, temperate and polar marine environments and consider
whether it is possible to predict or manage fishing-induced
changes in marine ecosystems. Such considerations are timely given
the disillusionment with some fishery management strategies and
that policy makers need a scientific basis for deciding whether
they should respond to social, economic and political demands for
instituting or preventing ecosystem-based management. Fishing has
significant direct and indirect effects on habitat, and on the
diversity, structure and productivity of benthic communities.
These effects are most readily identified and last longest in
those areas that experience infrequent natural disturbance. The
initiation of fishing in an unfished system leads to dramatic
changes in fish community structure. As fishing intensity
increases the additional effects are more difficult to detect.
Fishing has accelerated and magnified natural declines in the
abundance of many forage fishes and this has lead to reduced
reproductive success and abundance in birds and marine mammals.
However, such donor-controlled dynamics are less apparent in food
webs where fishes are the top predators since their feeding
strategies are rather more plastic than those of most birds and
mammals. Fishers tend to target species in sequence as a fishery
develops and this leads to changes in the composition of the
fished communities with time. The dramatic and apparently
compensatory shifts in the biomass of different species in many
fished ecosystems have often been driven by environmental change
rather than the indirect effects of fishing. Indeed, in most
pelagic systems, species replacements would have occurred, albeit
less rapidly, in the absence of fishing pressure. In those cases
when predator or prey species fill a key role, fishing can have
dramatic indirect effects on community structure. Thus fishing has
shifted some coral reef ecosystems to alternate stable states.
 Descriptors: Article Subject Terms Biological production | Commercial fishing | Community
composition | Ecosystem disturbance | Ecosystem management | Environmental impact | Fishery management | Fishing mortality | Forage fish | Habitat | Marine environment | Mortality | Polar waters | Species diversity | Temperate zones | Trophic relationships | Tropical environment | Tropical environments | Zoobenthos | Article Taxonomic Terms Pisces
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