Policy Impacts • Strategic Impacts • Strengthening the European Research Area • Added Value of a European-level project • Interactions with other Research Activities • Contribution to Policy Developments

The FinE project’s dynamic approach to fish stocks as study systems in conjunction with a modern understanding of the effects of exploitation on patterns of growth, reproduction, population diversification, and their genetic underpinning will greatly benefit both basic science and the development of management strategies capable of ensuring the sustainable exploitation of living marine resources. Knowledge and insights assembled within this project on particular species will easily be transferred to additional commercially important species within European waters.

Ensuring the long-term sustainable exploitation of fish stocks and implementing the ecosystem approach to fisheries

Fisheries provide an essential source of food, employment, recreation, and economic well-being for people – throughout Europe, and especially so in coastal areas away from the major centres of industrial and economic activities. Fisheries have the capacity of benefiting both present and future generations and should therefore be conducted in a responsible manner ensuring sustainable exploitation. While modern information technology offers new possibilities for diversifying the economic basis of less-favoured regions outside urbanized areas, fishing will undoubtedly continue to be an important source of employment, recreation, and economic activity for many coastal communities in Europe. Promoting the sustainable use of marine resources thus promotes equity in Europe. To secure the continued viability of coastal regions, it is important that marine resources be utilized in a maximally sustainable manner. This can be achieved through policies formulated on the basis of best possible scientific knowledge.
The FinE project will provide scientific insights about fisheries-induced evolution, a specific and, until recently underappreciated, threat to both long-term sustainable fisheries and biodiversity. This treat deserves a closer look for three reasons:

• First, fisheries-induced adaptive changes in exploited fish stocks may jeopardize their sustained value as renewable resources. This may include a gradual loss of productivity and deterioration of quality (average size) of the harvest, an increase in the variability of annual harvests, and a risk of abrupt stock collapses.
• Second, applying the precautionary approach to the management of marine resources establishes higher requirements for the consideration of potential threats, such as those posed by fisheries-induced genetic changes, even if these threats would not be deemed immediate but would be manifested in the medium or long term.
• Third, fisheries-induced evolution is highly relevant in the context of an ecosystem approach to fisheries: by affecting the genetic composition of populations, it modifies within- and between-populations genetic variation, two major constituents of biodiversity, and may additionally interact with functioning of entire ecosystems.

More specifically, the FinE project will enable the

• Evaluation of the ubiquity and extent of fisheries-induced evolution among a wide range of commercially exploited fish species characterized by contrasting life histories and distributed over a vast geographical area – a critical need if any informed management actions are to be undertaken;
• Understanding of the genetic underpinnings of life-history trait responses to fisheries-induced selection, in order to identify the evolutionary genetics of these responses and evaluate their degree of reversibility through adequate policies;
• Identification of those species that are intrinsically most at risk because of their life history and therefore require closer monitoring and more decisive management actions;
• Incorporation of the effects of fisheries-induced evolution on fish stock dynamics into management strategies and recovery plans;
• Consideration of socio-economic causes and consequences of fisheries-induced evolution, in the choice of management strategies; and
• Evaluation of management strategies for mitigating fisheries-induced evolution and for restoring fish stocks to identified reference points.

Integrating fisheries science, life-history theory, and population/quantitative genetics

A far-reaching divide – between the cultures underlying fisheries science on the one hand and evolutionary biology on the other, and, to a lesser degree, between life-history theory and population/quantitative genetics within evolutionary biology – has largely prevented these three major fields to inform and guide each other to the degree that is both perfectly achievable and urgently needed today. The benefits to be reaped from overcoming this divide can be unfolded in three different dimensions:

• In fisheries science itself, a strong need currently exists for developing the expertise required for implementing new international conventions, such as those about the conservation of biological diversity or the application of the precautionary principle in marine exploitation. Although many nations are officially committed to the corresponding United Nations’ resolutions and similar regulations, a strong scientific basis for their operational implementation still needs to be established. The FinE project offers to contribute to this endeavour by producing collections of suitable tools and valuable scientific insights on fisheries-induced evolution. It must be anticipated that, in the medium term, any research centre charged with providing scientific advice on fish stock management, be it at national or international levels, will require tools that can detect fisheries-induced adaptive change and inform decision makers about options for sustainable management, by avoiding negative effects on population viability and productivity.
• Life-history theory, in principle, has a lot to offer in relation to sustainable resource management. At present, however, the theory is still relatively far from realizing its full potential. First of all, research in life-history theory needs more intimate links with empirical studies. Bringing together carefully selected case studies from fisheries science with innovative modelling methodology from life-history theory therefore holds huge promise. In terms of sample size, data from fisheries science is often of a quality unachievable in the small-scale life-history experiments traditionally used for testing and developing the theory. We therefore believe that practitioners of life-history theory have much to gain from being confronted with fisheries data and the resulting questions. This interface will provide unique opportunities for further scientific understanding of how organisms adjust their diversity of life histories to different situations in a natural setting of ecological complexity.
• Similar to life-history theory, population genetics and quantitative genetics are, in theory, optimal tools for dealing with evolutionary changes induced by the exploitation of natural resources. However, so far both fields have addressed exploitation-related issues from another angle. Population genetics has been focusing mostly on the effect of fishing on neutral genetic variation, thus neglecting adaptive genetic changes and their effects on life-history traits and the productivity of fish stocks. The framework of quantitative genetics has been mostly applied to aquaculture issues, in order to improve production by altering life-history traits such as growth or survival in directions favourable for human consumption in terms of yield and quality. Unfortunately, insights from the controlled and manipulated environments of aquaculture have proved to be difficult to extrapolate to natural conditions. Both population genetics and quantitative genetics would make a great step forward by orienting research towards genetic changes of adaptive value affecting life-history traits in the wild. The long history of fisheries biology and the associated archival material (scales and otoliths) available in fisheries research institutes worldwide provide unique opportunities for directly studying the temporal path of evolutionary genetic changes.