Regimes and the history of the major fisheries off Canada's west coast

Abstract

The major fisheries on the Pacific coast of Canada can be grouped into 12 species that have consistently represented about 80–90% of the total catch from the past to the present. A review of population dynamics of these species indicates that climate and the ocean environment have a major impact on their productivity. We review the history of Canada's Pacific coast fishery to show that trends in catch were similar to trends in the climate and ocean environment. Decadal scale patterns in climate and the ocean are termed regimes and we show that it is the regime scale of climate variability that most influences the long-term trends in the catches in these major fisheries. Ignoring the impacts of regime shifts on the abundance trends in the future could result in collapses of major fisheries. The difficulty of knowing when a regime shift will occur may be overcome as we discover more about the mechanisms that affect the decadal-scale trends in the rotational velocity of the solid earth which is measured as the length of day (LOD).