Coral reef fish yield estimates and numbers of species in the western Indian Ocean

These are the date used in the following paper. It is the estimates of fisheries yields and numbers of species in 9 fish families in 115 locations in 8 countries. Fisheries yields and species declines in coral reefsT.R. McClanahanWildlife Conservation Society, Global Marine Programs, Bronx, NY, 10460Contact email: [e-mail] Environmental Research Letters, Revision 1AbstractNegative trade-offs between food production and biodiversity and the positive functional diversity - productivity relationships are potentially conflicting paradigms frequently evoked in conservation and sustainability science and management. While the complementary niches of species could potentially increase fisheries yields, stark food-diversity trade-offs have been proposed for wild-caught fisheries. Nevertheless, this first evaluation of stock biomass, yields, and species relationships in 115 coral reef locations in the western Indian Ocean found that management for multispecies-maximum sustained yield (MMSY) will increase both food production and numbers of species relative to open access fisheries. A precipitous loss of >50% of species did not occur until >70% of the fishable and target biomasses was depleted. At MMSY, 6-15% of total predicted number of fish species were lost indicating a need for other conservation mechanisms. These patterns occurred because the best-fit to the yield-numbers of species relationships was either a saturation or convex parabolic relationship. Fishing at MMSY in coral reefs should provide considerable diversity required for many ecosystem services. Low biomass and overfishing were common and around 80% of studied locations were losing ~2.0-2.5 tons.km-2.y1 and 15-40% of their species relative to MMSY.