From Catastrophe to Recovery: Stories of Fishery Management Success
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<i>Abstract</i>.â€â€Fish population recoveries can result from ecosystem change in the absence of targeted restoration actions. In Lake Ontario, native Deepwater Sculpin <i>Myoxocephalus thompsonii</i> were common in the late 1800s, but by the mid-1900s the species was possibly extirpated. During this period, mineral nutrient inputs increased and piscivore abundance declined, which increased the abundance of the nonnative planktivores Alewife <i>Alosa pseudoharengus</i> and Rainbow Smelt <i>Osmerus mordax</i>. Deepwater Sculpin larvae are pelagic and vulnerable to predation by planktivores. Annual bottom trawl surveys did not capture Deepwater Sculpin from 1978 to 1995 (<i>n</i> = 6,666 tows) despite sampling appropriate habitat (trawl depths: 7–170 m). The absence of observations during this time resulted in an elevated conservation status for the species, but no restoration actions were initiated. In 1996, three individuals were caught in bottom trawls, the first observed since 1972. Since then, their abundance has increased, and in 2017, they were the second most abundant Lake Ontario prey fish. The food-web changes that occurred from 1970 through the 1990s contributed to this recovery. Alewife and Rainbow Smelt abundance declined during this period due to predation by stocked salmonids and legislation that reduced nutrient inputs and food web productivity. In the 1990s, proliferation of nonnative, filter-feeding dreissenid mussels dramatically increased water clarity. As light penetration increased, the early-spring depth distribution of Alewife and Rainbow Smelt shifted deeper, away from larval Deepwater Sculpin habitat. The intentional and unintentional changes that occurred in Lake Ontario were not targeted at Deepwater Sculpin restoration but resulted in conditions that favored the species’ recovery. While standard surveys documented the recovery, more diverse information (e.g., observations in deep habitats and early-life stages) would have improved our understanding of why the species recovered when it did. Annual Lake Ontario trawl surveys have collaboratively expanded their spatial extent and diversified habitat sampled, based on lessons learned from the Deepwater Sculpin recovery.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".