1.Front section - IUCN

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Friends for Life: New partners in support of protected areas
Marine parks and fishing
Harvesting refugia are also used in marine ecosystems
as a management technique to safeguard or improve
the offtake of aquatic protein. Marine parks benefit
commercial, subsistence, and recreational fishers.
Marine parks are used for fisheries management by
prohibiting harvesting within the reserve. Marine
protected areas generally prohibit all fishing, so no
protected areas are specially designated to fishing, as
some terrestrial protected areas are dedicated to
hunting. In some cases, marine protected areas may
not completely halt fishing, but rather implement
restrictions on fishing gear, or the nature of the fishing
(recreational, and not commercial, for example)
(Rosenberg, 2001). When harvesting is halted,
populations increase inside the protected area,
allowing “spillover” of adults and juveniles beyond
park boundaries, and increasing the number of the
export of larvae outside the reserve. Fish inside park
boundaries will also tend to be older and bigger, with
a concordant increase in reproductive potential, or
ability to export eggs and larvae (Gell and Roberts,
2003).
Commercial and subsistence fishers will therefore
benefit as fish populations inside reserves increase.
Recreational fishers also benefit as populations
increase, because more fish are available to catch, and
the fish may be of a better quality. Recreational fishers
are often interested in harvesting large individuals as
trophies. Because marine protected areas allow
individuals within to achieve large sizes, the areas
outside marine protected areas yield larger fish. For
example, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge
in Florida has been closed to fishing pressure since the
establishment of the Kennedy Space Center in 1962.
Recreational fisheries adjacent to the reserve have
produced exceptional numbers of world-record-size
fish, with most of the fish size records from Florida
originating from around the reserve (Gell and
Roberts, 2003).
Similar to terrestrial hunting refugia, spatial
techniques have also long been used by traditional
people to regulate fisheries, for example, in Pacific
islands (Colding and Folke, 2001). Fishers utilizing
inland waters have similar traditional customs of
prohibiting harvesting in certain areas for part or all of
© Kent Redford
Kayapó man with fish and heron, Brazil.
the year (Welcomme, 2001). In contrast, marine
protected areas have been discussed in fisheries
science over the last 40 years, but only recently have
many been enacted (National Research Council,
2001).
The effects of marine protected areas on fish stocks
are still being researched, and studies postulating
benefits have often relied on theoretical simulations
(Sladek Nowlis and Roberts, 1999; Sumaila et al.,
2000; Gerber et al., 2002). However, the ability of
harvesting restrictions to increase biomass within park
boundaries is now generally accepted (Halpern, 2003;
Russ and Alcala, 2003). In addition, the benefits of
marine protected areas for fish stocks and harvesting
outside the protected area are increasingly recognised
(Gell and Roberts, 2003). The benefit of marine
protected areas to fishers depends on the amount of
spillover and larval export achieved by protected
areas, which is in turn heavily dependent upon reserve
placement, duration of harvesting prohibition, and
species’ life histories and ecologies. For example, fish
overspill can range from a few hundred metres to a
few kilometres in coral reef habitats, but more mobile
species in estuaries, continental shelves and rocky
reefs can travel distances of tens to hundreds of
kilometres (Gell and Roberts, 2003). Significant
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