ABSTRACT
Major concern over the fate of the world’s fisheries has recently been expressed in peer-reviewed scientific journals, newspaper articles, popular books and television documentaries. This concern is fuelled by data showing decreasing standing stocks or biomass of a number of major commercial fish species, reports of the demise of individual fisheries and predictions that the world’s commercial fisheries will collapse altogether if current trends do not change (e.g. Worm et al, 2006). These studies have focused largely on the issue of production – that is, the number of fish that live in, and are taken from, the oceans. Emphasis has also been placed on the historical abundance of fish stocks, with researchers endeavouring to establish how many fish there were at a given point in time, the biomass of a particular species prior to the advent of industrial fishing, and the long-term rate of decline of a particular stock. These efforts have entailed analysis of a wide range of archival data to estimate the catch per unit effort (CPUE) of a fishery and from that to estimate the biomass of the target species over a long temporal span (e.g. Rosenberg et al, 2005).
