Assessment of fish and shellfish stocks produced in the Biosphere Reserve

Dammann, Arthur

At the present time there are no data and no methodologies that are suitable for assessing the production from fishery stocks in such a small and arbitrarily defined geographic area as that of the Biosphere Reserve. For management purposes it is recommended that the Biosphere Reserve utilize the data and management measures which are produced and recommended by the Caribbean Fishery Management Council for the geological platform of Puerto Rico and the northern Virgin Islands. The entire platform contains stocks which are probably as discrete as any marine stocks can be. Until their relationship to the pan-Caribbean species. of which they are members. can be quantified they should be managed. as distinct populations but not as populations confined to politically defined areas within the naturally isolated platform. The very complex nature of tropical coral reef, grassbed, mangrove ecosystems and the small-scale fisheries which depend upon them. pose many problems for managers. The number of species entering the landings. the difficulty of obtaining statistical data from the scattered points of landing and the lack of middlemen and processors in the fishery make the use of usual mathematical techniques suspect for such fisheries. Moreover. in contrast to more highly capitalized commercial fisheries of other regions, the socio-cultural aspects of island fisheries become of relatively greater importance than the purely economic aspects. Fishery development projects in these tropical island shelf environments have a notably high rate of failure. Some of the factors which contribute to the failures are (1) the inability of political and economic developers to accept the low productivity and fragility of the fishery stocks on the platforms (2) the imposition of highly capitalized and mechanized fishing efforts on the system and (3) a misunderstanding of the actual role that small-scale fisheries play in the lives and well-being of indigenous people.