Fisheries-induced disruptive selection
Date
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
Commercial harvesting is recognized to induce adaptive responses of life-history traits in fish populations,in
particular by shifting the age and size at maturation through directional selection. In addition to such evolution of a target stock, the corresponding fishery itself may adapt, in terms of fishing policy, technological progress, fleet dynamics, and adaptive harvest. The aim of this study is to assess how the interplay between natural and artificial selection, in the simplest setting in which a fishery and a target stock coevolve, can lead to disruptive
selection, which in turn may cause trait diversification. To this end, we build an eco-evolutionary model for a size-structured population, in which both the stock's maturation schedule and the fishery's harvest rate are adaptive, while fishing may be subject to a selective policy based on fish size and/or maturity stage. Using
numerical bifurcation analysis, we study how the potential for disruptive selection changes with fishing policy, fishing mortality, harvest specialization, life-history trade offs associated with early maturation, and other demographic and environmental parameters. We report the following findings. First, fisheries-induced
disruptive selection is readily caused by commonly used fishing policies, and occurs even for policies that are not specific for fish size or maturity, provided that the harvest is sufficiently adaptive and large individuals are targeted intensively. Second, disruptive selection is more likely in stocks in which the selective pressure for
early maturation is naturally strong, provided life-history tradeoffs are sufficiently consequential. Third, when a
fish stock is over exploited, fisheries targeting only large individuals might slightly increase sustainable yield by
causing trait diversification (even though the resultant yield always remains lower than the maximum sustainable yield that could be obtained under low fishing mortality, without causing disruptive selection). We discuss the broader implications of our results and highlight how these can be taken into account for designing evolutionarily informed fisheries-management regimes.
Description
Keywords
Fisheries-induced evolution, Coevolution, Adaptive dynamics, Size at maturation, Evolutionary branching
Citation
Landi, P.; Hui, C.; Dieckmann, U. (2015) Fisheries-induced disruptive selection. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 365:204-216