THE BREN SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT
at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Presents

"The Tyranny of Scale in Marine Fisheries"

Hosted by Bren Assistant Professor Hunter Lenihan

Summary

According to the collective experience of Hilborn, Orensanz, and Parma, one of the three primary causes of unexpected failure in fisheries assessment and management is a mismatch between the scale of the fished population and the scale of assessment and management. Starting with my own doctoral studies on abalone (Haliotids) and continuing through experience with a range of species (including deepwater and reef fish, sharks, prawns, sea urchins, and sea cows), my personal bias is to promote the Tyranny of Scale to the top of their short list. As a depressed new doctor working within a government fisheries agency, I considered sustainably managing a world full of micro-stocks an impossible task. However, after almost thirty years of working on the interface between the fishing industry and government agencies, I’ve seen that it’s entirely possible. All it takes is the appropriate form of limited-access system linked directly to the responsibility to fish for information as well as for profit, a new breed of fisheries practitioners I call the barefoot ecologists, and a toolbox full of pragmatic approaches such as scale-less assessments and dataless, or rule-of-thumb, management.

Biography

Jeremy Prince has combined the roles of resource assessment modeler and commercial fisher to become a leading practitioner in the use of fisher lore to study fisheries ecology. He has worked on the interface between government and the fishing industry since the early 1980s, consulting to government, industry, and conservation groups in most of Australia’s more contentious fisheries assessment and management issues. He is currently chairman of the commonwealth Southern Shark Resource Assessment Group; a research member on the Gillnet, Hook and Trap Fishery Management Advisory Group; principal investigator for the Pearl Producers Association of Australia’s research program into ESD aspects of their industry; and senior team member for a multidisciplinary project developing alternative management strategies for the South East Australian Shark and Scalefish fishery.

Dr. Prince’s core personal interest is in the assessment and management of small-scale or micro-fisheries where the larger resource comprises a complex of relatively discrete and often variable breeding stocks. Convinced that overlooking the true spatial complexity of most natural resources lies behind many failures in fisheries assessment and management, he is planning to change the world through an FRDC funded project the objective of which is to reform management in the Australian abalone fishery. As a hobby, he maintains parallel involvements in the New Zealand abalone fishery, the Californian sea urchin fishery, and the Chilean coastal artisanal fisheries.

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