Title
Fisheries yields and species declines in coral reefs
Author(s)
McClanahan, Tim R
Published
2022
Publisher
Environmental Research Letters
Abstract
Negative trade-offs between food production and biodiversity and the positive functional diversity - productivity relationships are potentially conflicting paradigms that are frequently evoked in conservation and sustainability science and management. While the complementary niches of species could potentially increase fisheries yields, stark food-diversity trade-offs have been proposed for wild-caught fisheries. Nevertheless, this first evaluation of stock biomass, yields, and species relationships in 115 coral reef locations in the Western Indian Ocean found that management for multispecies-maximum sustained yield (MMSY) will increase both food production and numbers of species relative to open access fisheries. A precipitous loss of >50% of species did not occur until >70% of the fishable and target biomasses was depleted. At MMSY, 6-15% of total predicted number of fish species were lost indicating a need for other conservation mechanisms. These patterns occurred because the best-fit to the yield-numbers of species relationship was either a saturation or convex parabolic relationship. Fishing at MMSY in coral reefs should provide considerable diversity required to support many ecosystem services. Low biomass and overfishing were common and around 80% of studied locations were losing ~2.0-2.5 tons.km-2.y -1 and 15-40% of their species relative to MMSY.

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