EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Fishing down the food chain revisited: Modeling exploited trophic systems

Christopher D. Wilen and James Wilen

Ecological Economics, 2012, vol. 79, issue C, 80-88

Abstract: Several highly cited papers suggest that commercial fishing is altering marine ecosystems by “fishing down the food chain”. Recent evidence calls into question the generality of the original findings, but the papers all raise the question: what mechanisms lie behind exploitation patterns in a trophic system? This paper develops a simple model that shows how economic factors drive patterns of exploitation in a trophic system. We show that while fishing down the food chain is possible, there is no reason to suppose that the relevant economic factors favor such an outcome. As we show, other patterns are just as plausible. We also discuss and show how an index of trophic level-weighted harvest is not necessarily a good indicator of ecosystem health if biomass abundance is important.

Keywords: Trophic; Bioeconomic; Fishing down; Predator/prey; Fisheries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800912001899
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:79:y:2012:i:c:p:80-88

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.04.021

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:79:y:2012:i:c:p:80-88