Abstract

The Caribbean spiny lobster, or Panulirus argus, is one of the most economically important resources to Caribbean fisheries. High demand and low supply of spiny lobster have driven most fisheries to an excess of fishing capacity and created overfishing conditions in most fisheries. All fisheries are recruitment driven and in the last 10 years, recruitment has followed decreasing trends in most fisheries. Along with exploitation, changes in environmental and ecological conditions are likely to be impacting the spiny lobster's habitat. In this chapter, we identify and discuss population dynamics and fisheries processes that are key to the ecosystem approach to fishery management of the resource.

Introduction

Pragmatic management of fisheries resources requires stock assessment advice that promotes yields that are sustainable in the long term. This is not only a statutory requirement in many countries but paramount to achieving the long-term potential harvests of living marine resources. Fishery scientists strive to incorporate indices and functional relationships in stock assessment to improve forecasts of the implications of environmental change and fishing on the current and future status of those resources. Modeling environmental variables jointly with changing predatorprey interactions resulting from selective removals by fisheries and their overall effect on recruitment success is important to be able to forecast the implications of shifts in ocean conditions relative to the distribution, productivity and exploitation of fishery resources. Such an approach has to take account of ecosystem effects in setting harvest policies and therefore must depart from the old paradigm of single-species stock assessments in support of fishery management. From an ecosystem point of view, it is important to understand the impact of climate variability on the structure and locations of the habitat that a conglomerate of species needs to sustain the trophic dynamics of a productive ecosystem. One must answer questions such as: how does the relationship between climate and ecosystem affect such manifestly different patterns in population dynamics? How does knowledge of such relationships affect individual or collective fishery management objectives?

Scientists have developed processes for analysing a vast array of ecosystem indicators into a suite of models that try to explain the interactive dynamics between species, the environment and fishing.