Thursday
March 13, 2003
4:30-5:30 pm
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Social follows talk
Thursday
March 13, 2003
4:30-5:30 pm
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Social follows talk
Felicia ColemanProgram Director, Institute for Fishery Resource Ecology, Florida State UniversityGoliath Groupers: Fishing versus Protection
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http://www.bio.fsu.edu/mote/staff-coleman.htm
Groupers are reef fishes that occur worldwide and are extremely important to fisheries wherever they occur. They include many of the top-level predators in warm-temperate & tropical ecosystems, associated with deep-water and shallow reefs that typically follow pleistocene shorelines along the continental shelf edge. Their relationships with the places they live are so striking in some cases that they appear to be acting as keystone species, that is, species which by their very presence enhance the complexity of the habitat & thus the diversity of the communities within which they live. One of the ways our group has approached studying these fish--including gag, red grouper, goliath grouper, and others--is to examine them species by species, looking at each stage in their life cycle separately, for instance linking each stage with the habitat on which it depends. This approach works well for reef fish because the tendency is for each life history stage to be associated with different habitats with very different requirements for being successful. Effective management of exploited groupers requires considerable information on life history characteristics, recruitment dynamics, habitat requirements, and fishery interactions. It is clear that we have little of this information for any of the myriad temperate reef fishes managed in the southeastern United States, not only from our reliance on effort controls, but from the repeated failures of all but the most drastic measures to allow recovery from overexploitation. Several of the life history features that reef fish share render them particularly vulnerable to both fishing pressure and habitat degradation, including their longevity, slow maturation, their spatially and temporally discrete spawning sites, and reliance of juvenile on estuarine nursery habitat. In this talk, I will review the life history features important to fisheries and discuss management conundrums and alternative approaches, with an eye to improving population recovery and allowing for sustainable fisheries.
My primary research interest is in the population ecology of reef fishes. This interest led me to explore the effects of fishing on the demography of exploited populations, particularly in its effects on spawning aggregations of fish in the grouper family (Serranidae). Groupers are protogynous hermaphrodites and so change sex from female to male over the course of their lifetime. What I found was that, for several species at least, fishing appears to lead to a loss of males, thus skewing the sex ratio in favor of females.
This research, plus my long-standing interest in conservation, led me to question how (or whether) such ecologically relevant information for an exploited species was incorporated into its management and reflected in governmental policy. What I have found over the years is that in many cases, the information is not properly transferred from scientists to policy makers and the general public. I have spent a number of years working to bridge this gap where it relates to management of marine resources. In this work, I have been fortunate to serve on a number of committees and councils whose charges involve conservation of marine resources. Among these are the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (1996-1999), The National Marine Fisheries Service Ecosystem Management Advisory Panel (1997-1998), The Tortugas 2000 Marine Reserve Working Group (1998-1999), and the National Research Council (1998-2000). (See website listed above for further background.)