This Specific Targeted Research Project on Fisheries-induced Evolution (FinE) will contribute – in the context of the EU Programme on Integrating and Strengthening the European Research Area; Priority 8.1 on Policy-oriented Research; Activity I on Sustainable Management of Europe’s Natural Resources; and Topic 1.3 on Modernisation and Sustainability of Fisheries, including aquaculture-based production systems – to Task 2 on Fisheries-induced Changes in the Adaptive Genetic Potential of Exploited Fish Stocks. Phenotypic case studies will document trends in life-history traits, including maturation, reproductive effort, and growth, relevant for the demography and productivity of exploited fish populations. Genetic analyses will elucidate the genetic basis of fisheries-induced evolutionary changes suggested by phenotypic analysis. Eco-genetic models will be designed for evaluating alternative hypotheses explaining the observed data; for assessing the ecological consequences of fisheries-induced evolution for the yield, stability, and recovery potential of exploited stocks; and for developing and comparing practical management options.

Today, fishing is the dominant source of mortality in most commercially exploited fish stocks. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), world capture fisheries have reached a ceiling, with three stocks out of four being maximally exploited or overexploited. Since all fish species were genetically adapted to the environmental conditions experienced prior to intensive exploitation, the current, drastically altered, conditions cannot possibly leave their life-history patterns unaffected. In other words, fishing not only decreases the abundance of fish, but also changes their genetic composition.
The Fisheries-induced Evolution (FinE) project is set up to investigate the prevalence of fisheries-induced evolutionary changes in life-history traits of exploited fish stocks in European and North American waters. The aims are to unravel the underlying mechanisms of change ranging from the phenotypic to the genetic level, to evaluate their consequences on population and fisheries dynamics, and to provide recommendations for evolutionarily enlightened management. This objective necessitates the development and application of novel methodological tools for investigating field data both at phenotypic and genetic levels, together with the setup of relevant experiments on model species and the careful construction of theoretical models suitable for complementing field data analyses and for evaluating managerial options. Earlier investigations have focused on specific aspects such as the analysis of long-term trends in phenotypic data, the investigation of temporal changes in neutral genetic markers, artificial fishing experiments, or the modelling of fisheries-induced evolutionary changes in life-history traits and their demographic consequences for exploited stocks. However, a comprehensive investigation of fisheries-induced evolution at the phenotypic and genetic level and of consequences on fish stocks dynamics are still largely missing, mostly because of the wide range of scientific expertises and approaches required for tackling these challenges.
The FinE project aims at combining fields of expertise as diverse as population genetics and quantitative genetics, life-history theory, population dynamics, evolutionary theory, and fisheries science. The project will ensure a close integration of both empirical and theoretical lines of development in our understanding of evolutionary processes in exploited populations. The FinE project will thereby provide the scientific basis required for designing policies and implementing management measures that can cope with fisheries-induced adaptive changes.

The project’s overall objective can be broken down into three main lines of research:

1. Phenotypic case studies will aim at documenting phenotypic trends in life-history traits relevant for the demography and productivity of exploited fish populations, thus focusing on maturation, reproductive effort, and growth. In order to assess the ubiquity of fisheries-induced adaptive changes, various exploited stocks from European and North American waters will be investigated. In addition, care will be taken to cover all typical fish life histories by considering contrasting groups such as gadoids, flatfish, and small pelagics for iteroparous species, and Atlantic salmon and landlocked salmonids for semelparous species. The different studies will be based on long-term time series of field data, mostly hosted by national organizations responsible for fish stock assessment and advising for fisheries management. The general principle of the analyses will be to disentangle the plastic component of observed phenotypic trends from a potentially underlying evolutionary component, in order to assess the degree of reversibility of the fisheries-induced changes. The use of specifically tailored statistical methods, like probabilistic maturation reaction norms, will be critical in this respect. The following specific studies are foreseen:
• Fisheries-induced changes in Atlantic cod in the Barents Sea
• Fisheries-induced changes in Atlantic cod in Canada
• Fisheries-induced changes in North Sea gadoids
• Fisheries-induced changes in flatfish
• Fisheries-induced changes in small pelagics
• Fisheries-induced changes in Atlantic salmon
• Fisheries-induced changes in landlocked salmonids
• Comparative analysis and synthesis


2. Genetics analyses will aim to elucidate the genetic basis of fisheries-induced evolutionary changes suggested by phenotypic analysis. The work will be based on studying adaptive genetic changes affecting life-history traits under fisheries-induced selection at the DNA level (candidate genes) and in terms of quantitative genetics using historical collections of biological tissues (otoliths) sampled in the field. These studies will rely on the development of innovative molecular and statistical methodologies allowing tackling temporal adaptive genetic changes, instead of only investigating the neutral genetic differentiation that customarily was at the focus of previous genetics work. The various research actions to be covered are:
• Biological samples collection
• Baseline neutral genetic variation
• Genetic variation in candidate genes
• Quantitative genetic variation
• Comparative analysis of neutral and adaptive genetic variation
• Linking adaptive genetic variation and phenotypic variation
• Causal analysis


3. Eco-genetic models will be designed for evaluating alternative hypotheses advanced to explain observed data; for assessing the ecological consequences of fisheries-induced evolution in terms of exploited stock dynamics, viability and recovery, as well as fisheries yield; and for comparing various management scenarios. These analyses will address features and dimensions that are particularly difficult to cover in empirical analyses: multi-trait evolution, sex-specific fisheries-induced evolution, and economic drivers of fishery dynamics. Models will be constructed by carefully integrating relevant genetic, ecological, and environmental details, so as to attain sufficient degrees of realism for predicting the speed of evolutionary changes, while also properly describing population dynamics and fishery dynamics. The following specific topics will be addressed:
• Evolutionary determination of maturation reaction norms
• Fisheries-induced multi-trait evolution
• Evolutionary vulnerability of prototypical life histories
• Sex-specific dimensions of fisheries-induced evolution
• Fisheries-induced evolution of neutral and selected genetic markers
• Fisheries-induced evolution of specific stocks
• Implications for stock stability and recovery potential
• Economic models of fisheries-induced evolution
• Evolutionarily enlightened stock management

In addition to these three lines of research, which are explained in much greater detail in the descriptions of the corresponding first three work packages, the FinE project will specifically address two cross-cutting case studies, on Atlantic cod and common sole. This will result in the full integration of the various fields of expertise and results relevant for these two commercially exploited species. The two species have been chosen based on their high economic importance, both in terms of landings and financial value, their large combined geographical coverage from Arctic to Mediterranean waters, their contrasted typical marine life history, their well-known and intensive long-term patterns of exploitation, and the availability of long-term phenotypic and population ecological data time series, complemented by extensive historical tissue sample collections. Such data will be necessary for documenting long-term phenotypic trends in life-history traits, for evaluating fisheries-induced selection gradients, for assessing adaptive genetic changes, and for calibrating specific eco-genetic models.