Can commercial fishing cause evolution? Answers from guppies (<i>Poecilia reticulata</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Life history theory predicts that high adult mortality rates select for earlier maturity and increased reproduction. If such evolution occurs in response to the commercial exploitation of natural fish populations, then the correlated reduction in body size would reduce the yield of the fishery. Earlier maturity and reduced body size are seen in commercially exploited populations. Here, we compare the life histories of natural populations of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) from Trinidad that live in either high- or low-predation environments, which serve as surrogates for the presence or absence of commercial fishing. We can quantify mortality rate and life history variables, including age and size at maturity, in the laboratory and in nature. We have manipulated mortality rates in nature and measured the rate of evolution. High mortality selects for earlier maturity at a smaller size, as observed in commercial fisheries and as predicted by theory. Furthermore, the nature and magnitude of predator-induced mortality are comparable to those caused by commercial fishing. The rate of evolution in guppies predicts similar evolution in commercial fisheries on a time scale of decades. These attributes support arguments that humans, like predators, have acted as an agent of selection when exploiting populations of fish.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".