Fisheries

Fisheries are the harvesting and management of wild aquatic organisms for food or other uses. They include the people, gear, rules, and ecosystems involved in catching fish and other species.

Fishing gear: Equipment used to capture aquatic organisms, including nets, hooks, traps, and dredges. Gear selects which species and sizes are caught and shapes a fishery’s ecological impact.
Fishing quota: A legal limit on the amount of a species that may be caught or landed. Quotas turn stock advice into enforceable limits on removals.
Overfishing: Fishing at a rate that reduces a population below levels associated with sustainable production. Excessive removals can deplete stocks and impair their recovery.
Aquaculture: The farming of aquatic organisms under controlled or managed conditions. Unlike capture fisheries, aquaculture raises organisms rather than harvesting wild populations.
Climate change and fisheries: The effects of changing climate conditions on fish populations, fishing grounds, and fisheries. Warming and shifting habitats can make historical stock estimates and boundaries unreliable.
Bycatch: Organisms unintentionally caught while fishing for other species. Non-target catch is a direct consequence of how fishing gear encounters marine life.
Total allowable catch: The maximum catch of a stock permitted during a defined period. Managers use this limit to cap fishing mortality across a fishery.
Trophic cascade: A chain of ecological effects caused by changes in the abundance of predators or prey. Removing major fish predators can reorganize food webs through cascading effects.
Common-pool resource: A resource that is difficult to exclude people from using and is depleted by use. Wild fish stocks fit this resource type, creating shared-access management problems.
Shifting baseline syndrome: The gradual acceptance of diminished environmental conditions as normal by successive generations. Changing reference points can obscure the scale of past stock depletion.

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