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 May 9
Re-interpreting the Fisheries Crisis
Ray Hilborn
Richard C. and Lois M. Worthington Professor of Fisheries Management, UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
The popular literature and the pages of Science and Nature have been full of reports on the collapse of world fisheries. While there are indeed many problems in worlds fisheries it is not widely appreciated that most of the worlds fisheries are producing at near maximum potential, and the loss of potential harvest from overfishing is small. In the US we lose only 15% of our potential yield due to overfishing. This talk discusses the change in objectives of fisheries management away from maximum sustained yield and employment towards more concern about ecosystems and profitable fishing industries, how the pages of Science and Nature have been taken over by a agenda driven process and the peer review system has been corrupted, and how there are many successful sustainable fisheries in the world and we can learn from the elements of their success.
 About Dr. Hilborn
Ray Hilborn is Richard C. and Lois M. Worthington Professor of Fisheries Management in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington specializing in natural resource management and conservation. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in conservation, fisheries stock assessment and risk analysis and currently serves as an advisor to several international fisheries commissions and agencies. He authored “Quantitative fisheries stock assessment” with Carl Walters in 1992, and “The Ecological Detective: confronting models with data” with Marc Mangel, in 1997. Major areas of current and past research interest include Bayesian analysis of decision making in natural resources, adaptive management of renewable resources, the dynamics of the Serengeti ecosystem in east Africa, the role of hatcheries in management of Pacific salmon, the ability of institutions to learn from experience, statistical methods in testing dynamic ecological hypotheses, the analysis of migration and dispersal from mark-recapture data, and the ecological dynamics of fishing fleets. In 2005 he was the recipient of the American Fisheries Societies highest honor, the Award of Excellence. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada.
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