Economic tradeoffs in the Gulf of Maine ecosystem: Herring and whale-watching

Min-Yang Lee

Marine Policy, 2010, vol. 34, issue 1, 156-162

Abstract: This research attempts to quantify some of the effects of localized depletion of herring by examining the search times of commercial whale-watching vessels. Whale-watching vessels are indirect users of herring; whales feed on herring and may disperse when prey availability is low. A dataset of daily whale-watching outcomes is combined with fishing effort and oceanographic data to test the hypothesis that intensive fishing effort increases the search time of whale-watching companies. Our results suggest that fishing may have a detrimental impact on search time; however, the magnitude of this effect is fairly small. We find policy that the recently enacted policy which prohibits fishing for herring in whale-watching areas would decrease search times by a small amount. We find some evidence of a localized aggregation effect; search times are the lowest when herring are spawning in the inshore areas. These results should be of interest to policymakers in determining future fishing regulations in an ecosystem-based fisheries management context.

Keywords: Ecosystem; based; fisheries; management; Localized; depletion; Ecosystem; services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308-597X(09)00090-6
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:marpol:v:34:y:2010:i:1:p:156-162

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

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