Marine Protected Areas: Yay or Nay?

By: Grecia Guardiola

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Marine protected areas are a promising way of controlling effects of trawl fishing. First of all, marine protected areas are areas in which bottom trawl fisheries are not allowed to fish; they provide protection to exploited trawl fish, help conserve habitats, and maintain biodiversity. The main reason bottom trawl fishing is banned from these areas is to promote environmental sustainability; this is an advance because marine protected areas control bottom trawl fisheries from exploiting target fish, while still obtaining product from other areas. What is interesting though is the fact that by incorporating marine protected areas into the ecosystem, non-targeted species are in disadvantage (van Denderen et al., 2016). To illustrate, by having more of the target fish in the ecosystem, its preys or non-targeted species decrease in numbers due to the demand, which is a trade-off. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked; thus, food-web effects should be understood prior to selecting marine protected areas in order to avoid an unbalance in the ecosystem (van Denderen et al., 2016). Keeping environmental sustainability in mind, should marine protected areas be considered a yay or nay?

References

van Denderen, P. D., Rijnsdorp, A. D., and T. van Kooten. 2016. Using marine reserves to manage impact of bottom trawl fisheries requires consideration of benthic food-web interactions. Ecol Appl. doi:10.1002/eap.1360