Publisher : MPA News
Place of publication :
Publication year : 2007
Thematic : Marine Resources
Language : English
Note
One commonly held belief on no-take marine reserves is that although they can be effective in protecting relatively stationary organisms, they are ineffective for highly mobile ones. Oceanic species — including tunas, billfishes, sea turtles, cetaceans, and sea birds — often range over thousands of kilometers in their lifetimes, crossing into and out of protected areas along their seasonal migrations. When outside of the protected areas, they are exposed to fishing impacts, either as the targeted species or as bycatch. However, there are ways that marine reserves could, theoretically, be effective in protecting such species. Reserves could be made very large, for example, to encompass these species’ movements throughout their entire lives. Alternatively, no-take zones could be placed around the most critical habitats for these species, such as feeding and breeding grounds, or migration corridors. The entire spawning stock for eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna, for example, gathers each year to spawn in a small area of the Mediterranean, at which point the species becomes highly vulnerable to overfishing. Another option is more revolutionary: that is, reserves could have flexible, “dynamic†boundaries that would follow certain highly migratory species throughout their migrations. In other words, wherever that species was at any point in time, it would be protected by a moving no-take zone. Boundaries for these dynamic reserves would be continually adjusted — monthly, weekly, or even daily — based on satellite transmission of various data, such as the location of frontal areas on ocean currents. (These frontal areas have a tendency to concentrate oceanic predators and their prey, and are already targeted by pelagic fishing fleets using satellite imagery.) Management agencies would regularly report the adjusted boundaries of dynamic reserves to fishing vessels at sea.
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Keywords : Mangifera gracilipes
Encoded by : Mae Belen Llanza
