Computers and the future of fisheries

Abstract

The world's fisheries are a shambles. Everywhere we see signs of massive overexploitation, breakdown of regulatory and enforcement systems, and woefully inadequate investment in assessment and science. The credibility of fisheries science has been questioned with studies that have revealed severe overestimates in abundance and productivity in historical assessments for several major fisheries (Hutchings and Myers, 1994; McGuire, 1991; Parma, 1993; Pauly, 1994; Walters, 1996), indicating that we have contributed directly to the overcapitalization that we have traditionally blamed on greed and managerial stupidity. And all this has happened while whole new worlds of information gathering and analysis have been opened to us through computer technology. I am reminded of an old poster that is still displayed prominently on my office wall, a gift from participants in a 1979 Sea Lamprey International Symposium, displaying the adage "To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer!" In those days the adage was referring to the growing pains of an information management industry for such human affairs as banking; little did we know at the time how well it would apply to models that were appearing at the time for improving fisheries assessments.