Seafood prices reveal impacts of a major ecological disturbance
Edited by Bonnie J. McCay, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, and approved December 21, 2016 (received for review November 3, 2016)
Significance
Coastal hypoxia is a growing problem worldwide, but economic consequences for fisheries are largely unknown. We provide evidence that hypoxia causes economic effects on a major fishery that was once the most valuable fishery in America. Our analysis is also a breakthrough in causal inference for coupled human-natural systems. Although establishing causality with observational data is always challenging, feedbacks across the human and natural systems amplify these challenges and explain why linking hypoxia to fishery losses has been elusive. We offer an alternative approach using a market counterfactual that is immune to contamination from feedbacks in the coupled system. Natural resource prices can thus be a means to assess the significance of an ecological disturbance.
Abstract
Coastal hypoxia (dissolved oxygen ≤ 2 mg/L) is a growing problem worldwide that threatens marine ecosystem services, but little is known about economic effects on fisheries. Here, we provide evidence that hypoxia causes economic impacts on a major fishery. Ecological studies of hypoxia and marine fauna suggest multiple mechanisms through which hypoxia can skew a population’s size distribution toward smaller individuals. These mechanisms produce sharp predictions about changes in seafood markets. Hypoxia is hypothesized to decrease the quantity of large shrimp relative to small shrimp and increase the price of large shrimp relative to small shrimp. We test these hypotheses using time series of size-based prices. Naive quantity-based models using treatment/control comparisons in hypoxic and nonhypoxic areas produce null results, but we find strong evidence of the hypothesized effects in the relative prices: Hypoxia increases the relative price of large shrimp compared with small shrimp. The effects of fuel prices provide supporting evidence. Empirical models of fishing effort and bioeconomic simulations explain why quantifying effects of hypoxia on fisheries using quantity data has been inconclusive. Specifically, spatial-dynamic feedbacks across the natural system (the fish stock) and human system (the mobile fishing fleet) confound “treated” and “control” areas. Consequently, analyses of price data, which rely on a market counterfactual, are able to reveal effects of the ecological disturbance that are obscured in quantity data. Our results are an important step toward quantifying the economic value of reduced upstream nutrient loading in the Mississippi Basin and are broadly applicable to other coupled human-natural systems.
Acknowledgments
We thank Dan Obenour for providing annual estimates of the areal extent of hypoxia with alternative DO cutoffs (1.5 mg/L and 2.5 mg/L). Financial support for this research was provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Grants NA09NOS4780235 and NA09NOS4780186, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the Research Council of Norway.
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Cover image: The juxtaposed images of nucleopores, which are channels in the nuclear membrane, testify to advances in biological imaging over the past half century. The electron micrograph on the left was taken in 1953 by Joseph G. Gall and reveals a field of nucleopores. In the image on the right taken in 2016, Joseph G. Gall, Steven L. McKnight, and colleagues used super resolution microscopy to visualize binding of a proline:arginine poly-dipeptide to the central channel of nucleopores (red). The toxic poly-dipeptide is produced in the most common form of heritable amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The periphery of nucleopores is visualized by antibody staining to the annular protein, gp210 (blue). The study illuminates the role of nucleocytoplasmic transport in the pathogenesis of the disease. See article by Kevin Y. Shi et al. on pages E1111–E1117. Images courtesy of Zehra F. Nizami and Joseph G. Gall.
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Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Submission history
Published online: January 30, 2017
Published in issue: February 14, 2017
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dan Obenour for providing annual estimates of the areal extent of hypoxia with alternative DO cutoffs (1.5 mg/L and 2.5 mg/L). Financial support for this research was provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Grants NA09NOS4780235 and NA09NOS4780186, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the Research Council of Norway.
Notes
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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