- and how should we fish them if we knew? New paper from Ocean Life.
“What checks the natural tendency of each species to increase in numbers is most obscure”. Such wrote Charles Darwin one and a half century ago in “Origin of Species”. The statement is still true: empirical knowledge about such density dependent regulation of animal populations is exceedingly difficult to obtain and interpret. In the new paper “When in life does density dependence occur in fish populations?” in Fish and Fisheries, we develop the missing theoretic understanding about density dependent regulation in fish populations. Why care? We show that a correct understanding of density dependence is crucial for a central instrument in Maximum Sustainable Yield fisheries management – the minimum landing size regulations – that are used to avoid landing young fish by fisheries.
See the paper in Fish and Fisheries here
or download a preprint here
K.H. Andersen, N.S. Jacobsen, T. Jansen and J.E. Beyer (2016) When in life does density dependence occur in fish populations? Fish and Fisheries. doi:10.1111/faf.12195.