Abstract
Effective assessments of the status of Caribbean fish communities require historical baselines to adequately understand how much fish communities have changed through time. To identify such changes and their causes, we compiled a historical overview using data collected at the beginning (1905–1908), middle (1958–1965) and end (1984–2016) of the 20th century, of the artisanal fishing practices and their effects on fish populations around Curaçao, a small island in the southern Caribbean. We documented historical trends in total catch, species composition, and catch sizes per fisher per month for different types of fisheries and related these to technological and environmental changes affecting the island’s fisheries and fish communities. We found that since 1905, fishers targeted species increasingly farther from shore after species occurring closer to shore had become rare. This resulted in surprisingly similar catches in terms of weight, but not composition. Large predatory reef fishes living close to shore (e.g., large Epinephelid species) had virtually disappeared from catches around the mid-20th century, questioning the use of data from this period as baseline data for modern day fish assessments. Secondly, we compared fish landings to in-situ counts from 1969 to estimate the relative contributions of habitat destruction and overfishing to the changes in fish abundance around Curaçao. The decline in coral dominated reef communities corresponded to a concurrent decrease in the abundance and diversity of smaller reef fish species not targeted by fishers, suggesting habitat loss, in addition to fishing, caused the observed declines in reef fish abundance around Curaçao.
Highlights
Historical accounts by the earliest European explorers of Caribbean waters report large abundances of manatees, large sharks, sea turtles and monk seals that are unimaginable given the current state of these ecosystems (e.g., [1,2,3])
Over-exploitation of fishes has resulted in cascading effects that have affected the functioning of reef ecosystems as a whole [9, 16, 17]
Using data on historical catches from Curacao spanning the entire 20th century, we found that fishers at the beginning of the 20th century targeted reef fishes near shore, but started to target near-shore pelagic species in the mid-20th century after large reef fishes had decreased in abundance
Summary
Historical accounts by the earliest European explorers of Caribbean waters report large abundances of manatees, large sharks, sea turtles and monk seals that are unimaginable given the current state of these ecosystems (e.g., [1,2,3]). Historical fishing and its effect on reef fishes on Curacao communities. Larger (predatory) fish have become especially rare and no longer affect other reef community members through behavioral and trophic interactions, a phenomenon referred to as “ecological extinction” [9, 10]. The disappearance of large fish has been linked to an increase in former prey species (prey release) [10, 11], including those that can feed on or destroy living corals (e.g., [12, 13]), an increase in disease prevalence in fishes as infected hosts are no longer effectively culled [14] and reductions in reef accretion due to the historical overfishing of parrotfishes [15]. Over-exploitation of (predatory) fishes has resulted in cascading effects that have affected the functioning of reef ecosystems as a whole [9, 16, 17]
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