Examples of this process occur across terrestrial and aquatic taxa of all sizes, phylogenies, and life history strategies ( Sullivan et al., 2017). Our very high rates of harvest and disruption of predator-prey relationships shifts the morphology and life history of target species toward traits (small adult size etc.) that are a disadvantage in situations where they must avoid non-human predators and thus has the potential to contribute to reduced resilience of fished populations and impair the recovery of stocks when harvesting ceases.Īny organism that is subject to high rates of mortality due to human behavior rapidly evolves behavioral, anatomical, and demographic adaptations to reduce mortality rates. This engenders high capture efficiency and explains why non-human predators in marine systems are forced to focus on naïve and young individuals as prey, whereas humans are able to target adult fishes. By removing size relationships between predator and prey, avoiding predator recognition, disrupting learning cues and through the rapid evolution of technology, fishing by humans subverts natural processes of selection on fishes that act to reduce mortality to non-human predators. We argue that this has occurred because these techniques circumvent the evolutionary arms race that exists between all other non-human marine predators and their fish prey that codifies effective tactics of foraging and predator evasion. 5Department of Biomedical Sciences, WCVM, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, CanadaĪlthough the behavior of most organisms evolves in response to harvest, teleost fishes in marine systems have remained susceptible to the same basic fishing techniques of hook and lines and nets for millennia.4Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.3College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom.2Department of Marine Biology and Aquaculture, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia.1Australian Institute of Marine Science, Crawley, WA, Australia.
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