Are pelagic fisheries managed well?
a stock-assessment scientists perspective Mark Maunder, Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission We discuss the question “Are pelagic fisheries managed well?” As the reader might imagine, this is a difficult question to answer. First, pelagic fisheries is a very broad category including sharks, tunas, billfishes, sardines, and many other species, as well as many methods of capturing these species. There are both successes and failures within this category, and it is not possible for any single piece of writing to cover the whole range. Therefore, we restrict ourselves to the pelagic fisheries directed at tunas, which are probably what the general public is most aware of and which are our area of expertise. In particular, we use the tuna fisheries in the eastern Pacific Ocean as an example. To make answering the question easier, we can break it into three component questions: (1) What are the management objectives? (2) Are the management objectives reasonable? (3) Can we determine whethe
