14 - Perspectives

If there is one thing I have learned in over 20 years working with fish and fisheries, it is to be patient. Change, the kind needed for new approaches to management or acceptance of new ideas or ways of seeing the world, takes time.

SCRFA was formed a decade ago, and at the time I had high hopes that the, then, little understood phenomenon of spawning aggregations would shortly be, firmly and clearly, on the agendas of both marine conservation planners and fisheries managers. After all, spawning aggregations are key life history events and play a critical role in the reproductive capacity of many fish species, including several that are variously threatened. The majority of reef fish aggregations that are known are on the decline, and many colleagues would consider spawning aggregation management to be a “no-brainer” for a healthy fishery. Yet, despite considerable work this has not yet materialized, and aggregations are still not routinely managed or conserved globally.

However, there has been some progress. Encouraging examples are increasing of management action and even success with aggregation recovery, and there are many advances in our understanding of the biology of aggregating species The reason, I believe, for such slow progress is that it takes a lot of time to assimilate and then ‘institutionalize’ new ideas. In the case of aggregations, a characteristic variously shared by many commercially important species, the gluts of fish taken while gathered to spawn have historically been the very basis of many fisheries. They are also give, sometimes misleadingly, illusions of plenty in a fishery because of the large numbers of fish so obviously available over a short spawning period. Under such circumstances, it is often difficult to muster the public or political will to manage and limit extraction.

Accepting the need for managing despite apparent abundance witnessed when many fish are caught in an aggregation, is all part of the hard lesson we are learning that business cannot be ‘as usual’ in the future in our global marine fisheries. It takes time to acknowledge that we simply cannot continue taking as much as we want, when we want, and hope to still have plenty in the future. The lesson with aggregating species is proving to be a hard one to digest. We would certainly welcome ideas and comments on how to accelerate the process and get aggregations more widely on management, policy and conservation agendas globally.

Yvonne Sadovy
SCRFA
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