Thursday
February 21, 2008
4:30-5:30 pm
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Social follows talk
Thursday
February 21, 2008
4:30-5:30 pm
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Social follows talk
Director Biospherics P/L, Adjunct Associate Professor, Murdoch University, Australia
According
to the collective experience of Hilborn, Orensanz and Parmam, 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 on 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 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 data-less, or rule-of-thumb
management.
Jeremy Prince is Director of Biospherics and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Murdoch University, Austalia. Jeremy is internationally recognized for his practical expertise in the fisheries ecology, assessment and management of benthic invertebrates, particularly abalone as developed through his doctoral studies. Briefly in charge of an Australian State Fisheries Research Agency in the late 1980s (Tasmania), Jeremy proceeded to carve-out a unique, independent role in Australian fisheries management, research and assessment. While still following the illusive goal of sustainable management of small scale fisheries resources, he consults largely on the managed fisheries of the Australian Federal Government across a wide range of large, commercial fisheries (deepwater fish and sharks, shallow water shark, bentho-pelagic trawl fish, shallow water rock lobster, prawn, abalone and sea urchins) and the management of the traditional hunt for dugong and pearl culture in the Torres Strait, north of Australia. Across his various projects and roles, Jeremy is keenly interested in biological oceanography, specifically how it relates to spawning aggregation dynamics. Jeremy's career has been built on the application of fisher knowledge to fisheries issues and their technical expertise to fisheries management and monitoring. For example, working with the motivation and understanding of commercial abalone divers to implement the assessment and management of individual abalone reefs with regionally managed abalone fisheries, designing structured stock survey programs that shark fishermen incorporate into almost normal fishing patterns, or monitoring orange roughy spawning aggregations and controlling the disturbance of aggregation with collaborative surveys using industry trawlers.
Most dangerous of Jeremy's ideas are using 'barefoot ecologists' to empower fisher people to monitor, assess and manage their own small scale fisheries resources, and the 'barefoot ecologist's toolbox' to enable communities and individuals to conduct their own small scale scientific processes in order to manage their own resources. He is currently fostering insurgency in Californian fisheries management, with the aim of promoting the Oceania model of rights-based management of self-monitored fisheries, in which the right to fish is linked strongly to the responsibility to provide information and manage at finer scales.
Jeremy is Chairman of the Southern Shark Assessment Group, Scientific Member on the Gillnet Hook and Trap Fishery Management Advisory Committee, Chairman Deepwater Assessment Group, Chairman Deepwater Shark Working Group, Scientific Liaison for the East Coast Tuna and Billfish Fishery and Sustainability Science Advisor to the South Seas Pearl Culture Industry. He has active R&D projects on the fine scale management of abalone fisheries, developing interactive education software about Torres Strait dugong stocks, ecosystem modeling and conserving deepwater dogfish populations.
Prince, J.D. 2003. The barefoot ecologist goes fishing. Fish and Fisheries. 4: 359-371.
Streaming
video - click here
Need to have Windows Media Player (connect
here to DOWNLOAD the program)