Empirical Dynamic Modeling: what is it and how does it forecast salmon fisheries? Which fish are the smartest? What is driving declining seagull populations in the Salish Sea? How do you sample beluga whale breath? An impressive collection of baby fish photographs Are humans affecting how fish find their way home? Pacific sardine populations collapsing Reconsidering... Read More
Highlights of Fisheries Magazine – March 2015 In this Issue: President’s Commentary • AFS Membership: How Much Should it Cost? by Donna Parrish Policy • Our Renewed Effort to Make the Most of Science by Thomas E. Bigford Journal Summaries • AFS Journals Support Sustainable Aquaculture • Predicting Brook Trout occurrence in stream reaches throughout... Read More
A New Embryonic Imprinting Paradigm for Hatchery Programs Straying by hatchery-reared salmon is a major concern for conservation and recovery of many salmon populations. Fisheries managers have attempted to minimize negative ecological and genetic interactions between hatchery and wild fish by using parr-smolt acclimation facilities to ensure successful olfactory imprinting and homing fidelity. However, the... Read More
by Mauricio Ramírez-Rodríguez Publications that involve the identification of important fisheries species generally do not relate scientific names to common names in landing records. For this reason, and in order to contribute to improving the quality of fisheries statistics and the works based on them, Mexico’s National Commission of Aquaculture and Fisheries (CONAPESCA) and the... Read More
by Thomas P. Quinn LONG-TERM RESEARCH As we conduct fieldwork and process samples in the lab afterwards, we often ponder what the real sample size is. We measured hundreds or thousands of fish, shrimp, clams, or whatever it is that we work on. These seem like adequate sample sizes until we remember that they were... Read More
by Manuel Mendoza-Carranza and Alejandro Espinoza-Tenorio (Fisheries magazine: February 2015) Despite the conspicuous character of sawfish (Pristis spp.) in shallow estuarine waters, current records in the southern Gulf of Mexico are so scarce that they have been declared locally extinct from many areas where they formerly occurred (Fernandez-Carvalho et al. 2013). In Mexican waters of... Read More
Pacific Lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus) have been an important part of the ecological community and co-evolved with aquatic species of the western rivers of the United States. Scarce information on Pacific Lamprey has hindered conservation and management efforts. To assess and conserve Pacific Lamprey, we developed a conservation initiative composed of three parts: assessment, conservation agreement,... Read More
Learning to Manage and Managing to Learn: Sustaining Freshwater Recreational Fisheries in a Changing Environment ABSTRACT: Freshwaters are being transformed by multiple environmental drivers, creating uncertainty about future conditions. One way of coping with uncertainty is to manage for resilience to unanticipated events while facilitating learning through adaptive management. We outline the application of these... Read More
Geographic information systems (GIS) are powerful tools for analysis and interpretation of spatial data commonly encountered in fisheries science. We presented details of GIS use in fisheries management in a prior study and found cost to be a factor limiting GIS use. This article introduces fisheries managers to free or open-source GIS. Free or open-source... Read More
Monitoring of fishing activities is an essential component of successful fisheries management that can provide verifiable fishery-dependent data on fishing activities and help assess performance and success of fisheries management plans. Fishery managers and stakeholders have often struggled in developing and implementing effective monitoring programs due to lack of information, funding, and peer-to-peer learning from... Read More
