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Fishing benefits from marine reserves

Posted on 29 November 2001

The creation of marine reserves in which fishing is banned can benefit fisheries in adjacent areas, according to Dr Callum Roberts of the Environment Department at the University of York.

The research into this controversial area is published in the journal Science (today, 30 November 2001), and examines the evidence that marine reserves, in which fish species are conserved, improve fish stocks in neighbouring areas.

The research, centred on marine reserves in St Lucia and Florida, suggests not only that more fish appear in reserves following protection, but that they are also larger. They produce more offspring than exploited populations, and those offspring are exported to fishing grounds by ocean currents. There is also a spillover of adult fish migrating from the reserves as protected stocks build.

Within five years of the creation of a network of five small reserves (Soufrière Marine Management Area) in St Lucia, in the Caribbean, Dr Fiona Gell, a member of the York research team, showed that catches by adjacent fisheries increased from between 46 to 90%. In these reserves, which were created to protect over-exploited reef fish, the biomass of five types of commercially exploited fish tripled in three years within the reserves and doubled in adjacent fishing grounds.

"Despite some nervousness from fishermen about the establishment of marine reserves, our research shows that fisheries actually benefit from reserves within a very short space of time," said Callum Roberts.

The research also shows that long-established reserves supply trophy-sized fish to recreational fisheries through spillover across their boundaries. Captures of world-record size fish are recorded as being concentrated in areas close to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge at Cape Canaveral, Florida.