Fish Population Dynamic and Stock Assessment

6.2.5. Limitations of MSY approach

Although it is widely practiced by state and federal government agencies regulating wildlife, forests, and fishing, MSY has come under heavy criticism by ecologists and others from both theoretical and practical reasons. The concept of maximum sustainable yield is not always easy to apply in practice. Estimation problems arise due to poor assumptions in some models and lack of reliability of the data. Biologists, for example, do not always have enough data to make a clear determination of the population’s size and growth rate. Calculating the point at which a population begins to slow from competition is also very difficult. The concept of MSY also tends to treat all individuals in the population as identical, thereby ignoring all aspects of population structure such as size or age classes and their differential rates of growth, survival, and reproduction.

As a management goal, the static interpretation of MSY (i.e., MSY as a fixed catch that can be taken year after year) is generally not appropriate because it ignores the fact that fish populations undergo natural fluctuations (i.e., MSY treats the environment as unvarying) in abundance and will usually ultimately become severely depleted under a constant-catch strategy. Thus, most fisheries scientists now interpret MSY in a more dynamic sense as the maximum average yield (MAY) obtained by applying a specific harvesting strategy to a fluctuating resource.