Assessing Conservative Take Limits for Marine Forage Fishes

Forage fish are an integral part of marine ecosystems, providing prey to many species in the food web and linking upper and lower trophic levels. They are also targeted by fisheries around the world, with increasing pressure as the demand for seafood products escalates.  A pertinent goal, therefore, is to implement management measures that take into account the important ecological role of forage fish so that ecosystem services are maintained.  Because forage fish are often strongly driven by environmental variability and changes in natural mortality due to shifts in predator abundance, standard equilibrium-based production models may not provide conservative estimates of allowable catch or overfishing limits. The Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force used single-species and ecosystem models to examine a variety of fishery management strategies and biological reference points to determine which ones minimize risk to forage fish and their predators.  This talk will review our discussions on the advantages and disadvantages of various biomass thresholds and fishing mortality rates considered by the Task Force, and present our recommendations for incorporating uncertainty into forage fish assessment models.