UC San Diego

Fisheries are economically and culturally important features of coastal communities around the globe. Ranging from recreational fishing to commercial harvest, fisheries represent the final large-scale vestige of humans hunting for food. While terrestrial food systems shifted almost entirely toward agriculture and cultivation, aquatic and marine food systems are still remarkably reliant on wild capture for their supply. As a result, fisheries and the species they target are inextricably linked to human behavior. Ecologists wishing to better understand fisheries and how to make them more sustainable must account not only for variables in the natural environment, but also variables associated with the anthropogenic use of fisheries resources. My dissertation explores this notion by addressing applied fisheries ecology questions across species, fishery, and global scales. At the species scale, chapters one and two investigate the trophic and movement ecology of Giant Sea Bass (Stereolepis gigas), a species nearly extirpated from United States waters by fishing activities. At the fishery scale, chapter three explores the interdependencies between species harvested by a multispecies fishery and how those relationships change as a function of sea surface temperature. And finally at the global scale, chapter four looks at the nature of global seafood trade and characterizes the management intensity associated with production versus consumption of seafood across countries. Each chapter and scale of fisheries ecology investigated contributes a different type of information to the broader knowledge base of fisheries science, and combined they present a valuable contribution to the field.