Edited by Bonnie J. McCay, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, and approved December 20, 2017 (received for review June 20, 2017)
Climate change is impacting global fisheries and societies that depend on them. Identifying climate adaptation measures requires understanding how environmental changes and management policies interact in driving fishery productivity. Coincident with the recent exceptional warming of the northwest Atlantic Ocean, the American lobster has become the most valuable fishery resource in North America. Here we show that interactions between warming waters, ecosystem changes, and differences in conservation efforts led to the simultaneous collapse of lobster fishery in southern New England and record-breaking landings in the Gulf of Maine. Our results demonstrate that sound, widely adopted fishery conservation measures based on fundamental biological principles can help capitalize on gains and mitigate losses caused by global climate change.
Managing natural resources in an era of increasing climate impacts requires accounting for the synergistic effects of climate, ecosystem changes, and harvesting on resource productivity. Coincident with recent exceptional warming of the northwest Atlantic Ocean and removal of large predatory fish, the American lobster has become the most valuable fishery resource in North America. Using a model that links ocean temperature, predator density, and fishing to population productivity, we show that harvester-driven conservation efforts to protect large lobsters prepared the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery to capitalize on favorable ecosystem conditions, resulting in the record-breaking landings recently observed in the region. In contrast, in the warmer southern New England region, the absence of similar conservation efforts precipitated warming-induced recruitment failure that led to the collapse of the fishery. Population projections under expected warming suggest that the American lobster fishery is vulnerable to future temperature increases, but continued efforts to preserve the stock's reproductive potential can dampen the negative impacts of warming. This study demonstrates that, even though global climate change is severely impacting marine ecosystems, widely adopted, proactive conservation measures can increase the resilience of commercial fisheries to climate change.
↵1Present address: Centre for Fisheries Ecosystems Research, Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada A1C 5R3.
Author contributions: A.L.B. and A.J.P. designed research; A.L.B. performed research; A.L.B., M.A.A., and J.D.S. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.L.B. analyzed data; and A.L.B., K.E.M., R.A.W., Y.C., M.A.A., A.J.A., J.G.S., J.D.S., and A.J.P. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
See Commentary on page 1678.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1711122115/-/DCSupplemental.
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