Community Effects of Fishing

Abstract

This chapter uses the community model to repeat many of the classic impact calculations of a single stock on the entire community. Here, a focus is the appearance of trophic cascades initiated by the removal of large predators. When a component of an ecosystem is perturbed, the effects are not isolated to the component itself but cascade through the ecosystem. Perturbations are mainly propagated through the predator–prey interactions. The chapter also considers the trade-offs between a forage fishery and a consumer fishery, and the extension of the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) concept to the community, before finally returning to the single-stock aspects.