For each such potential change of the modelled system, we investigated if it would lead to a need to adapt fishing strategies (as expressed by fishing effort and mortalities) to achieve msMSY and the consequences it would cause to yields, revenues, and stock biomasses.
Combined with the above described increase in seal biomass, harbour porpoise increases to the two different carrying capacities formed our two marine mammal scenarios to test the sensitivity of msMSY to changes in these species: one in which grey seals and harbour porpoises would reach their anticipated carrying capacities, and one in which this would be the case, but porpoises would additionally keep up their southward migration. Both scenarios are speculative because they project forward based on previous trends. For the seals, the best projection from the population model available was used, but it should be noted that the carrying capacity of a system for a population that is growing from lower numbers is numerically difficult to estimate because the population has not yet reached its asymptote. For the porpoises, two different assumptions about future distributional trends were utilised without a good understanding of the drivers that caused the 1995/2005 re-distribution. However, these assumptions did allow us to achieve our aim to explore the behaviour of the ecosystem under substantial increased predation pressure from the marine mammal species and to compare this with the effects of bottom-up processes.
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This study explores the sensitivity of msMSY fishing strategies and yields to projected ecological changes in a food-web model of the southern North Sea. It shows in which cases fishing pressures have to be adapted in response to potential future ecosystem regimes to produce maximum catches and revenues, and how yields and spawning stock biomasses may react. All potential environmental changes tested here have negative effects on the yields of the three fish species sole, plaice, and cod. Generally, plaice catches are most robust, followed by sole. Brown shrimp catches suffer from cuts in system productivity, but benefit from cod stock reductions through marine mammals. Of the scenarios tested, losses in primary productivity pose the most severe challenges to all three fisheries, beam, otter and brown shrimp trawlers, while the predicted increases in marine mammals consistently raise the least concerns.
Considering the predicted consequences of marine mammal upsurge, even the strongest assumptions (including an almost six-fold increase of seal biomass) lead to disproportionately lower responses of biomasses and yields, in contrast to the amplified, overproportioned effect of the 30% reduced primary production. Should this appear unexpected at first, that expectation gets entirely reversed when looking at absolute changes in biomass or production in tonnes per annum: The standing stock of phytoplankton alone is 300 times higher than that of all marine mammals combined, whereas the annual total primary production (P/B*B = P) is six orders of magnitude higher than that of marine mammals in the Ecopath 1991 base model [46].
Additional limitations arise from the application of the different scenarios. As such, our primary productivity setup is tangled with issues in any of the lower trophic level model runs synthesized by Lenhart and co-authors (c.f. second section in Methods). Also, the -30% primary productivity there applies for certain areas only, while we interpreted it as a whole area average in the case of de-eutrophication. This deems our productivity reduction scenario a rather extreme test of the system. Many of the de-eutrophication measures mentioned in the scenario modelling of Lenhart and colleagues [11] have already been undertaken, such that it cannot be taken for granted that the decrease in primary productivity we hypothesize would prevail. 2ff7e9595c
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