Fishing and jellyfish eradicate fish 180 years ago ...

• Main Authors: MacKenzie, Brian R., Poulsen, Bo
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: ASC 2009 - Theme session E 2024
• Subjects: Fisheries and aquaculture; Pressures, impacts, conservation, and management; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17895/ices.pub.25101866; https://ices-library.figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Fishing_and_jellyfish_eradicate_fish_180_years_ago/25101866

No abstracts are to be cited without prior reference to the author.Sustainable fish populations require both healthy ecosystems in which they can live and grow, and protection from overfishing. A rare historical example from the first half of the 19th century allowed us to describe the chronology of how the vulnerability of a herring (Clupea harengus) population to ecosystem variability was increased by effects of fishing on the population and food web interactions within the ecosystem. Both the population and fishery collapsed when several years of increasing exploitation were followed by an extreme climatic-hydrographic perturbation in 1825 that affected herring survival and changed food web structure (jellyfish bloom). Estimated levels of fishing mortality in years leading up to the collapse of Limfjord herring were 3-5 fold higher than natural mortality rates and similar to those which later led to collapses of 3 major herring populations in the north Atlantic (North Sea Norwegian spring-spawning ...