Move and you’re dead: commercial trawl fisheries select for fish that don’t move far
Date
2022-05-17
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Abstract
Recent research on harvest-induced evolution of behaviour in (especially aquatic) animals has focused on the shy-bold axis, but foraging and
dispersal behaviour have received little attention. Here, we consider the selective effect of systematically localised trawl harvesting from a wild
population of mobile animals that vary phenotypically in their range of movement (resulting in a continuum between wide-ranging and sedentary
behaviours). We use a spatially explicit individual-based model of an empirically-based demersal fish population and trawl fishing in a realistic
seascape. We test whether a sustained spatially concentrated pattern of fishing can select for or against wide-ranging vs. more sedentary
behaviour as the fish perform biased random foraging in a seascape of spatially varying resource quality, leading to an approximation of the ideal
free distribution. The simulation predicted a strong micro-evolutionary shift towards more sedentary behaviour as wide-ranging animals flow
into a population sink caused by concentrated fishing. The shift towards short-rangers increased with fishing intensity and spatial precision with
which fishing activity matches fish abundance; it decreased with habitat spatial complexity (fragmentation of suitable habitat). Most cases led
to the effective extinction of the trait values at the upper end of the ranging continuum, indicating important implications for the management
of exploited fish stocks.
Description
Publication history: Accepted - 10 May 2022; Published - 17 June 2022.
item.page.type
Article
item.page.format
Keywords
fisheries induced evolution, ideal free distribution, dispersion, spatial population structure, behavioural syndrome
Citation
de Castro, F., Kraak, S.B.M., Shephard, S., Sadykov, A., Reid, D.G. and Farnsworth, K.D. (2022) ‘Move and you’re dead: commercial trawl fisheries select for fish that don’t move far’, ICES Journal of Marine Science. Edited by M. Heino. Oxford University Press (OUP). doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsac104.