Journal Article

A management case study for a new commercial fishery

Perschon, W. Clay, Belovsky, Gary E.

2019

Overview

A fishery for brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) cysts to supply the aquaculture industry considerably expanded in the late 1980s in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. With this expansion, concerns emerged in the 1990s about the fishery’s sustainability, especially its impact on the abundant western North American waterbirds that use the lake and feed on brine shrimp. We track the development of management strategies using adaptive management by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR), which focused on the biology of the system and development of biology-based harvesting models. The models and their rationale are presented, their success in forecasting is evaluated, and implications for managing the harvest and conserving waterbirds are examined. We view this as an interesting case study because it transpired over a short time in a relatively simple system. This permitted us to clearly track management from the onset of a harvest market, through realization that the harvest had to be managed in the absence of needed biological knowledge, to the adaptive development of management strategies as biological knowledge was accumulated. The outcome illustrates the success that harvest management can attain with careful monitoring of the resource and terminating the harvest when a necessary escapement stock is attained.

• Publisher: UNKNOWN,Ecological Society of America
• Subject: Adaptive management / Aquaculture / Aquatic birds / Artemia / Artemia franciscana / Bioaccumulation / Biology / brine shrimp / Brines / Case studies / Cysts / Decapoda / Eared Grebes / Fisheries / fishery management / Great Salt Lake / Harvesting / lakes / markets / maximum sustained yield / monitoring / Resource management / Saline water / Utah / water birds / Waterfowl / Wildlife