![]() Despite relatively low population sizes until recent centuries, humans have used these tools to great effect, proving themselves to be extremely efficient hunters, with evidence of overharvesting of fish stocks dating back centuries or even thousands of years in many freshwater ( Finney et al., 2000) and marine habitats (e.g., Lopes et al., 2016). The same excavations also revealed the first evidence of the manufacture and use of recognizable fish hooks somewhere between 23,000–16,000 years ago ( O'Connor et al., 2011). ![]() The practice was probably occurring well before this time in the seafaring communities of humans colonizing the edges of archipelagos and continents in the region. ![]() The first archeological evidence of targeted pelagic fishing of teleosts in marine environments has been recovered from cave systems in Timor in South-East Asia and dates back 42,000 years ( O'Connor et al., 2011). Teleost fishes have been collected from the wild by humans as a source of protein for a very long time. Notably, reductions in the adult body size of fishes (and accompanying reproductive output) over limited time spans of a few decades in response to fisheries are common across many wild populations ( Jørgensen et al., 2007). In aquatic systems, experimental studies show that for teleost fishes, this process is remarkably swift size-selective harvesting in fish populations can generate changes in adult size, reproductive output, activity and personality in only five generations ( Uusi-Heikkilä et al., 2015) and these changes have a strong genetic basis that is slow to revert after the cessation of harvest ( Conover et al., 2009 Uusi-Heikkilä et al., 2017). They include the evolution of female tusklessness in elephants as a response to poaching ( Jachmann et al., 1995), rodenticide resistance ( Song et al., 2011), and trap avoidance in small mammals ( Parkes and Panetta, 2009) reductions in size due to harvesting in wild plants ( Sullivan et al., 2017) and antibiotic resistance in microbes ( Chopra and Roberts, 2001). Examples of this process occur across terrestrial and aquatic taxa of all sizes, phylogenies, and life history strategies ( Sullivan et al., 2017). Our very high rates of harvest and disruption of predator-prey relationships shifts the morphology and life history of target species toward traits (small adult size etc.) that are a disadvantage in situations where they must avoid non-human predators and thus has the potential to contribute to reduced resilience of fished populations and impair the recovery of stocks when harvesting ceases.Īny organism that is subject to high rates of mortality due to human behavior rapidly evolves behavioral, anatomical, and demographic adaptations to reduce mortality rates. This engenders high capture efficiency and explains why non-human predators in marine systems are forced to focus on naïve and young individuals as prey, whereas humans are able to target adult fishes. By removing size relationships between predator and prey, avoiding predator recognition, disrupting learning cues and through the rapid evolution of technology, fishing by humans subverts natural processes of selection on fishes that act to reduce mortality to non-human predators. We argue that this has occurred because these techniques circumvent the evolutionary arms race that exists between all other non-human marine predators and their fish prey that codifies effective tactics of foraging and predator evasion. ![]() 5Department of Biomedical Sciences, WCVM, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, CanadaĪlthough the behavior of most organisms evolves in response to harvest, teleost fishes in marine systems have remained susceptible to the same basic fishing techniques of hook and lines and nets for millennia.4Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.3College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom.2Department of Marine Biology and Aquaculture, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia.1Australian Institute of Marine Science, Crawley, WA, Australia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |