Challenges to sustaining the productivity of oceanic and coastal fisheries have become more critical and complex as these fisheries reach the upper limits to ocean harvests. In addition, it is now clear that we are managing interactive and dynamic food webs rather than sets of independent single-species populations. Fisheries products cannot be extracted from the sea without ecosystem effects; even though we all know this, we have not incorporated the consequences of fishing food webs and modifying trophic structure and species interactions into the scientific advice that informs policy and management systems. This insufficiency has come at a cost of collapsed fisheries and unintended consequences. Fisheries influence non-targeted as.
