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Removal of important predators by fishing can result in trophic cascades and indirect effects on marine benthic communities. Indirect effects are especially evident when prey populations released from predation by fishing have the ability to modify entire benthic communities, as do sea urchins. Sea urchins have been shown to dramatically alter the underwater landscape by grazing, by converting stands of large erect algae into coralline barrens. In the western Mediterranean, a recent extension of coralline barrens into areas formerly dominated by erect algal assemblages has been attributed to release of predation on sea urchins by overfishing. Most suggestions concerning the transition from erect algal assemblages to coralline barrens, however, have been speculative, and little descriptive and experimental work has been carried out to verify the hypothesis that fish predation on sea urchins (and its subsequent release by overfishing) drives this transition. Here we critically review the literature concerning the effect of fishing on sea urchin populations and its subsequent maintenance of different algal assemblages in the Mediterranean. The extant data cannot refute the \"fishes as important predators\" model, but we argue that other processes (recruitment, pollution, disease, large-scale oceanographic events, sea urchin harvesting, food subsidies, and availability of shelters) may also be important in regulating the structure of Mediterranean algal assemblages.

There is now widespread agreement that fish stocks are severely depleted and fishing activity must be limited. At the same time, the promise of the green economy appears to offer profitable new opportunities for a sustainable seafood industry. What do these seemingly contradictory ideas of natural limits and green growth mean in practice? What do they tell us more generally about current transformations to the way nature is valued and managed? And who suffers and who benefits from these new ecological arrangements? Far from abstract policy considerations, Patrick Bresnihan shows how new approaches to environmental management are transforming the fisheries and generating novel forms of exclusion in the process.Transforming the Fisheriesexamines how scientific, economic, and regulatory responses to the problem of overfishing have changed over the past twenty years. Based on fieldwork in a commercial fishing port in Ireland, Bresnihan weaves together ethnography, science, history, and social theory to explore the changing relationships between knowledge, nature, and the market. For Bresnihan, many of the key concepts that govern contemporary environmental thinking-such as scarcity, sustainability, the commons, and enclosure-should be reconsidered in light of the collapse of global fish stocks and the different ways this problem is being addressed. Only by considering these concepts anew can we begin to reinvent the ecological commons we need for the future.

:  Through most of the last century, three endemic kilka species supported major commercial species in the Caspian Sea. It is clear that catches and abundance of all species have changed, but catch and sampling data are limited and stock assessments are inadequate. Recent changes in the Caspian Sea ecosystem have occurred as a consequence of climatic environmental change (sea level change) and ecologic change caused by the invasive ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi. This paper examines the effects of these changes on the population biology and biomass of anchovy kilka Clupeonella engrauliformis in Iranian waters of the Caspian Sea from 1995 to 2004. For most years during this 10‐year period, we estimated the age structure of catch, length–weight relationship, von Bertalanffy growth parameters, condition factors, sex ratios, maturity stages determined from ovarian analysis, natural and fishing mortality, age at first capture, and spawning biomass. The instantaneous coefficient of natural mortality was estimated as 0.473/year and the instantaneous coefficient of fishing mortality varied during the 10‐year period between 0.541 and 2.690/year. Biomass of anchovy kilka declined from about 186 000 t in 1996 to less than 12 000 t in 2004. Recent high fishing rates were not sustainable after the introduction of Mnemiopsis, so overfishing is part of the explanation for the collapse of anchovy kilka in the Caspian Sea.

In the present paper we review some factors considered to explain the dramatic decline in the abundance of cod in the eastern Baltic. Environmental conditions, e.g. salinity and oxygen content, are known to have a considerable impact on recruitment. We conclude that, at present, low recruitment due to deteriorated spawning conditions accompanied by high mortality due to commercial fishing and, thus, a decrease in spawning stock biomass are major determinants for distribution of cod in the Baltic. Still, a number of additional factors may be important. The impact by sprat and herring predation on eggs and larvae may be considerable under certain circumstances. The temporal shift in spawning time towards summer months has likely resulted in spawning in more deteriorated oxygen conditions. The change in spawning stock structure towards younger fish probably affects the survival of eggs and larvae negatively. Since this change is closely related to high fishing pressure, low recruitment might, to a large extent, be a management issue. The M74 syndrome, a thiamine deficiency known to affect the Baltic salmon, has also been discussed in relation to poor cod recruitment. We conclude that it is unlikely that the Baltic cod suffers from M74 since thiamine levels in gonads from Baltic cod have been found to be, on average, almost 10-fold those found in healthy salmon. Moreover, in contrast to salmon, the survival of cod larvae has been found to be unaffected by thiamine treatment.

Excessively high rates of fishing mortality have led to rapid declines of several commercially important fish stocks. To harvest fish stocks sustainably, fisheries management requires accurate information about population dynamics, but the generation of this information, known as fisheries stock assessment, traditionally relies on conservative and rather narrowly data-driven modelling approaches. To improve the information available for fisheries management, there is a demand to increase the biological realism of stock-assessment practices and to better incorporate the available biological knowledge and theory. Here, we explore the development of fisheries stock-assessment models with an aim to increasing their biological realism, and focus particular attention on the possibilities provided by the hierarchical Bayesian modelling framework and ways to develop this approach as a means of efficiently incorporating different sources of information to construct more biologically realistic stock-assessment models. The main message emerging from our review is that to be able to efficiently improve the biological realism of stock-assessment models, fisheries scientists must go beyond the traditional stock-assessment data and explore the resources available in other fields of biological research, such as ecology, life-history theory and evolutionary biology, in addition to utilizing data available from other stocks of the same or comparable species. The hierarchical Bayesian framework provides a way of formally integrating these sources of knowledge into the stock-assessment protocol and to accumulate information from multiple sources and over time.

The Earth's oceans are overfished, despite more than fifty years of cooperation among the world's fishing nations. There are too many boats chasing too few fish. In Saving Global Fisheries, J. Samuel Barkin and Elizabeth DeSombre analyze the problem of overfishing and offer a provocative proposal for a global regulatory and policy approach.Existing patterns of international fisheries management try to limit the number of fish that can be caught while governments simultaneously subsidize increased fishing capacity, focusing on fisheries as an industry to be developed rather than on fish as a resource to be conserved. Regionally based international management means that protection in one area simply shifts fishing efforts to other species or regions. Barkin and DeSombre argue that global rather than regional regulation is necessary for successful fisheries management and emphasize the need to reduce subsidies. They propose an international system of individual transferable quotas that would give holders of permits an interest in the long-term health of fish stocks and help create a sustainable level of fishing capacity globally.

The metaphor is a hallmark of Classical Hebrew poetry. Some metaphors, such as \"Yhwh is king\" or \"Yhwh is warrior,\" play a foundational role. The same does not hold for metaphors from the fishing industry. Because they had access to only two major freshwater sources, archaeological research demonstrates that this industry did not play a major socioeconomic role in ancient Israel. Fishing has nevertheless made a substantial contribution to prophetic and wisdom literature. All metaphors manifest reality, but given the physical circumstances of a largely agrarian, nonmarine society, what does the sustained presentation of fishing metaphors in the Hebrew Bible communicate? Examining the use of fishing images in the Hebrew Bible is a formidable task that demands an open mind and a capacity to mine the gamut of contemporaneous evidence. In Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men, Tyler Yoder presents the first literary study devoted to the fishing images used in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as in the Mesopotamian textual records. This calls for a penetrating look into cultural contact with Israel's neighbors to the east (Mesopotamia) and southwest (Egypt). Though nearly all fishing metaphors in the Hebrew Bible carry overt royal or divine connotations that mirror uses well-attested in Mesopotamian literature, this comparative analysis remains a largely untapped area of research. In this study of the diverse literary qualities of fishing images, Yoder offers a holistic understanding of how one integral component of ancient Near Eastern society affected the whole, bringing together the assemblage of disparate materials related to this field of study to enable scholars to integrate these data into related research and move the conversation forward.

The species of hake, making up the genus Merluccius, are commercially important and currently largely over exploited, with many stocks badly depleted and showing only limited signs of recovery. From the end of the 1990s, concepts such as sustainability, ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management, a code for the responsible conduct for fisheries, governance and others have emerged or have been considered by politicians, stakeholders and society. Moreover, new tools for stock assessment have been developed. But many hake stocks of the genus Merluccius show no sign of restoration. Hakes: Biology and Exploitation brings together a wealth of important information on the biology and exploitation of hake and hoki stocks around the world. Each chapter provides an overview of the fisheries of each species in an ecological and environmental context, looking at stock distribution, characteristics of the environment, life history, reproduction, diet, growth, mortality, pricing and markets of each geographical region and the hake species found there. With chapters written by regional experts on hake species and included within Wiley-Blackwell's prestigious Fish and Aquatic Resources Series, Hakes: Biology and Exploitation provides up-to-date and comparative information, including new approaches to fisheries management, for all those involved in fisheries management, aquatic ecology and biological sciences.