Measuring the Value of Forage Fish to Recreational Fishermen

Fisheries management has been traditionally single-species oriented. Only recently more pressure has been put on developing a holistic, science-based approach that considers the ecosystem as a whole. This approach is widely known as ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM). One of the most often highlighted aspects of EBFM is the relevance of predator-prey interactions in the aquatic ecosystems. The motivation is that there are considerable trade-offs between the supporting role of forage species as energy conveyors in food webs and provisioning service as target species to fisheries. We study this aspect by looking at the Chesapeake Bay. The motivation is a recent debate on the potential impact of excessive forage base fishing. In particular, we are interested in the propagation of forage overfishing through the food web and its influence on more valuable, higher trophic species fisheries. We develop a Bayesian model of recreational harvest of striped bass where benefits are derived from stock size as well as age structure. The age structure drives the probability of catching a fish of a particular size what is of considerable importance to the fishery highly constrained by minimum catch size regulations. Then, using a dynamic multispecies framework (Ecosim) and modified random utility model, we analyze multiple scenarios varying by menhaden regulations and derive benefits changes imposed on the striped bass recreational fishery. We focus on the recreational sector as recent research indicates that the recreational fishing is becoming increasingly important and new management strategies may be necessary to address this shifting trend