Location, Location, Aggregation: Where Small Management Actions Can Yield Big Wins for Fisheries and Conservation

Marine ecosystem management has traditionally been divided between fisheries and conservation approaches. Here we offer a pathway towards a single management vision where small investments in conservation can offer disproportionately large benefits to fisheries production, fisheries management, and biodiversity conservation. We provide a series of evidenced-based arguments that support an urgent need to recognize fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) as a focal point for fisheries management and conservation on a global scale. These sites serve as productivity hotspots – small areas of the ocean that are dictated by the interactions between physical forces and geomorphology, attract multiple species to reproduce in large numbers, and support food web dynamics, ecosystem health, and robust fisheries. FSAs are comparable in vulnerability to breeding aggregations of seabirds, sea turtles, and whales yet they rarely receive sufficient attention and are declining worldwide. Protected aggregations do recover to benefit fisheries through increases in fish biomass, catch rates, and larval recruitment at fished sites. The small size and spatio-temporal predictability of FSAs allow monitoring, assessment, and enforcement to be scaled down while benefits of protection scale up to entire populations. Fishers intuitively understand the linkages between protecting FSAs and healthy fisheries and thus tend to support their protection.