Symposium number: 07

Title of Symposium: RESPONSES OF BIRDS TO (OVER)FISHING

Principal organizer: Bruno Ens
Alterra-Texel, P.O. Box 167, NL-1790 AD, Den Burg (Texel), The Netherlands
email: Bruno.Ens@WUR.NL

Second organizer: Bob Furness
University of Glasgow, Graham Kerr Building, G12 8QQ, Glasgow, United Kingdom

First keynote speaker: Bob Furness
University of Glasgow, Graham Kerr Building, G12 8QQ, Glasgow, United Kingdom
Title of first keynote paper: Responses of seabirds to prey depletion

Second keynote speaker: Bruno Ens
Alterra-Texel, P.O. Box 167, NL-1790 AD, Den Burg (Texel), The Netherlands
Title of second keynote paper: Modelling the responses of birds to (over)fishing

Contributed talks

Symposium description: Many key foods for sea- and shore- birds are harvested by fisheries. Examples include cockles, mussels, sand-eels, capelin, herring, walleye pollock and anchoveta. Stocks of some of these key foods have been over-exploited severely, and falls in prey abundance have had dramatic impacts on sea- and shore- bird populations. There has been a 90% mortality among Common Guillemots in the Barents Sea following the collapse of the capelin population there, as well as mass mortality of Common Eiders in the Wadden Sea consequent on over-exploitation of mussel stocks, and breeding failure of some sea-birds in the North Sea and at Shetland following major falls in local abundance of sand-eels. Although fishery managers may aim to include ecosystem considerations within management of fisheries, the mechanisms are not yet in place to effect them. A major impasse stems from the coincidence that the stocks of seafood harvested by both birds and fishermen are also subject to natural fluctuations and ecosystem changes caused by, for example, eutrophication and climate change. As a result, it is often difficult to assign declines in sea- and shore- bird populations to a single cause. Accordingly, the aim of this symposium will be to review the ecological relationships between sea- and shore- birds and their food resources, together with the models describing them, and from this to canvass how the needs of these top predators can be incorporated into fishery management.

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