Ecology: Managing Evolving Fish Stocks

Evolutionary impact assessment is a framework for quantifying the effects of harvest-induced evolution on the utility generated by fish stocks. CREDIT: N. KEVITIYAGALA/SCIENCE Darwinian evolution is the driving process of innovation and adaptation across the world’s biota. Acting on top of natural selection, human-induced selection pressures can also cause rapid evolution. Sometimes such evolution has undesirable consequences, one example being the spreading resistance to antibiotics and pesticides, which causes suffering and billion-dollar losses annually (1). A comparable anthropogenic selection pressure originates from fishing, which has become the main source of mortality in many fish stocks, and may…