Fishing activity skyrocketed ahead of ban in South Pacific area

Ahead of a full ban, fishing increased 130 percent in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area in the South Pacific, setting back projected efforts to let nature rebuild fish stocks by 18 months, researchers say. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of over-extracted fisheries from 65 percent to 72 percent,” a four-member research team wrote in a study […]