Lessons learnt on the management of short-lived fish from the Bay of Biscay anchovy case study: Satisfying fishery needs and sustainability under recruitment uncertainty

This paper summarizes the lessons learnt for the management of small pelagic fish from the case study of managing the international fishery on the Bay of Biscay anchovy. A constant catch regime ended up with a fishery crash and closure (2005–2009) after a series of recruitment failures. Precautionary advices had been disregarded due to their inability to predict the size of the population during the first half of the year when the major fishery takes place. The crash triggered the EU to develop a long-term management plan in 2008. In the absence of a recruitment indicator, biological risk was minimized through a close coupling between assessment, advice and management, changing the management year to start just after the spring surveys on adults. A major improvement arrived in 2014 by the incorporation of an early recruitment indicator from an autumn acoustic survey on juveniles. This allowed additional exploitation of the resource at similar risk levels. Accordingly, TACs are nowadays set after the recruit survey on a management calendar basis. The interactive collaboration between fishers, scientists, and managers allowed inclusion of the stakeholders’ preferences for a biomass-based catch bounded harvest strategy suitable for these valuable fisheries. This strategy allows catches between a minimum and maximum TAC level, to account for an economically viable minimum activity when approaching a minimum biomass threshold level, and for the limited market absorption capacity when exceeding an upper biomass threshold level, respectively. Such strategy was adopted by consensus and supposed a successful participatory process in fishery management.

This work has been carried out with the financial support of the Basque Government (Agriculture and Fisheries Department) to the authors affiliated at AZTI, the European Commission through the STECF (Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries) meetings and the EU through the funding of several projects, as PRONE (Precautionary risk methodology in fisheries -- Contract No. 022589), CEVIS (Comparative Evaluations of Innovative Solutions in European fisheries management -- Contract No. 022686) and UNCOVER (Understanding the mechanisms of stock recovery -- Contract No. 022717). This is publication number 1149 from the Marine Research Division of AZTI.

Peer reviewed