Harvesting At The Community Level

Most fisheries are not directed at individual species alone. Rather, in many instances, species within a community are caught together and are also part of competitive networks and food webs. Species that are caught together are subject to technical interactions. Species that compete or are connected through predator–prey interactions (or other types of interactions) are subject to biological interactions. Ignoring either of these forms of interaction in management can lead to unintended consequences. Technical solutions can help to avoid some species while targeting others, but a comprehensive solution requires creating the right economic incentives and some incidental catch is still inevitable. Accounting for trophic interactions means that biological reference points depend on the abundance of other taxa. Single-species approaches are invalid in a multispecies or community context where biological interactions are important. Technical interactions can make it impossible to achieve target exploitation rates even if biological interactions are relatively unimportant.