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Across publicly owned natural resources, the practice of recovering financial compensation, commonly known as resource rent, from extractive industries influences wealth distribution and general welfare of society. Catch shares are the primary approach adopted to diminish the economically wasteful race to fish by allocating shares of fish quotas—public assets—to selected fishing firms. It is perceived that resource rent is concentrated within catch share fisheries, but there has been no systematic comparison of rent-charging practices with other extractive industries. Here, we estimate the global prevalence of catch share fisheries and compare rent recovery mechanisms (RRM) in the fishing industry with other extractive industries. We show that while catch share fisheries harvest 17.4 million tons (19% of global fisheries landings), with a value of 17.7 billion USD (17% of global fisheries landed value), rent charges occurred in only 5 of 18 countries with shares of fish quotas primarily allocated free of charge. When compared with other extractive industries, fishing is the only industry that consistently lacks RRM. While recovering resource rent for harvesting well-governed fishery resources represents a source of revenue to coastal states, which could be sustained indefinitely, overcharging the industry might impact fish supply. Different RRM occurred in extractive industries, though generally, rent-based charges can help avoid affecting deployment of capital and labor to harvest fish since they depend on the profitability of the operations. Our study could be a starting point for coastal states to consider adapting policies to the enhanced economic condition of the fishing industry under catch shares.

Reliable catch information is scarce for most sharks and rays worldwide, with almost half of the stocks considered to be Data Deficient due to limited species-specific catch statistics. Western Australia (WA) hosts a diverse number of shark and ray species, some of which are considered to be threatened with extinction at a global level. Commercial catch statistics only account for shark and ray landings. The present study used the best available information to reconstruct unaccounted and unreported catches for 47 shark and ray taxa to better understand the impact of fishing. For some species, there was good agreement between reconstructed catches and reported landings, but overall reconstructed catches were 57% higher than those derived from official statistics alone, underestimating the actual extraction level for many species. The reconstructed catch time series provide the basis for the assessment of all species of sharks and rays captured in WA, including protected species that interact with commercial and recreational fisheries.

Although different fisheries can be tightly linked to each other by human and ecosystem processes, they are often managed independently. Synchronous fluctuations among fish populations or fishery catches can destabilize ecosystems and economies, respectively, but the degree of synchrony around the world remains unclear. We analyzed 1,092 marine fisheries catch time series over 60 yr to test for the presence of coherence, a form of synchrony that allows for phase-lagged relationships. We found that nearly every fishery was coherent with at least one other fishery catch time series globally and that coherence was strongest in the northeast Atlantic, western central Pacific, and eastern Indian Ocean. Analysis of fish biomass and fishing mortality time series from these hotspots revealed that coherence in biomass or fishing mortality were both possible, though biomass coherence was more common. Most of these relationships were synchronous with no time lags, and across catches in all regions, synchrony was a better predictor of regional catch portfolio effects than catch diversity. Regions with higher synchrony had lower stability in aggregate fishery catches, which can have negative consequences for food security and economic wealth.

How can an emerging economy, beset by political, economic and resource challenges, jump-start the technology catch-up process in the agricultural sector and then forge an ecosystem to facilitate the continual generation and dissemination of innovations? Equally important, how can it maintain the viability and salience of its catch-up initiatives subsequent to the entry and inevitable dominance of multinational companies? We answer these questions by studying catch-up in Brazil’s soy seeds sector over four decades (1973–2015). In an environment of political and economic uncertainty, Embrapa, a public sector organization, forged partnerships to first develop absorptive capacity and innovation capabilities, and then build an ecosystem of diverse organizations to generate and disseminate catch-up outcomes to farmers and other end users. Embrapa also developed critical tacit knowledge and complementary assets that – along with its emphasis on environmental sustainability and protecting national interests – helped maintain its salience even after the entry and market dominance by multinational agribusinesses. In addition to demonstrating critical roles for public sector organizations and public private networks in technological catch-up in an emerging economy’s agricultural sector, our study calls into question the prevalent notion of technological catch-up as a rush to reach the technological frontier at any cost.

Monitoring marine resource exploitation is a key activity in fisheries science and biodiversity conservation. Since research surveys are time consuming and costly, fishery-dependent data (i.e., derived directly from fishing vessels) are increasingly credited with a key role in expanding the reach of ocean monitoring. Fishing vessels may be seen as widely ranging data-collecting platforms, which could act as a fleet of sentinels for monitoring marine life, in particular exploited stocks. Here, we investigate the possibility of assessing catch composition of single hauls carried out by trawlers by applying DNA metabarcoding to the dense water draining from fishing nets just after the end of hauling operations (hereafter “slush”). We assess the performance of this approach in portraying β-diversity and examining the quantitative relationship between species abundances in the catch and DNA amount in the slush (read counts generated by amplicon sequencing). We demonstrate that the assemblages identified using DNA in the slush satisfactorily mirror those returned by visual inspection of net content (about 71% of species and 86% of families of fish) and detect a strong relationship between read counts and species abundances in the catch. We therefore argue that this approach could be upscaled to serve as a powerful source of information on the structure of demersal assemblages and the impact of fisheries.

The Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club awarded annual prizes for the best catches, canons, and glees in the years 1763–1793. Due to the unusual relationship between contenders and jury members, pragmatic compositional strategies and attempts to accommodate the ironic humour of the club's elite as well as divergent textual (mis)readings generated a repertoire of deeply ambivalent works. An analysis of this ambivalence in three prize-winning glees offers insight not only into the composers' intentions, but into the self-image of the elected membership and the effects of their influence.

Kaptai Lake, the largest artificial reservoir in Southeast Asia, is home to a diverse fish fauna that supports thousands of livelihoods and is distinguished by multi-species and multi-gear fisheries. In Kaptai Lake, the gear-based catch composition, catch rate and distribution pattern are little known. From August 2020 to April 2021, a nine-month study was conducted in five upazilas using direct catch assessment surveys and fishing effort surveys from four fishing gears, namely seine nets, gill nets, lift nets, and push nets. A total of 49 morpho-species from 22 families were found, with three species from the Clupeidae accounting for 93.63 % of the catch in all gear combined. The total catch composition and CPUE were higher in seine nets (75.07 %, 13.86 ± 1.8 kg/gear/trip respectively) and lower in lift nets (4.97 %, 1.01 ± 0.21 kg/gear/trip) and showed significant differences among gears, except sampling sites whereas CPUE was higher in Naniarchar for seine nets (17.29 ± 8.89 kg/gear/trip) and lower in Langadu for lift nets (0.62 ± 0.25 kg/gear/trip). Seine nets captured more species, and the number of species increased significantly as CPUE increased. Our study assessed four gears that targeted different fish species with little overlap in leading species; seine nets and gill nets primarily targeted Clupeidae (96.53 % and 41.69 %, respectively), whereas lift nets and push nets primarily targeted Cyprinidae and Palaemonidae (38.93 % and 99.37 % respectively). The observed abundance and variety of fish species captured in gill nets suggest a significant overlap in the selectivity of this fishing method with that of lift nets. Due to the varying contributions of sites and gears, the nMDS ordination pattern reveals a weak spatial variation in catch composition. According to the SIMPER results, Bagridae, Gobiidae, and Ambassidae were the most significant contributors to site grouping patterns across all gears. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the catch composition does not follow the typical pattern of spatial variation. By implementing measures to eliminate or decrease the usage of small mesh nets, there is expected to be a corresponding decrease in the capture of small fish. Additionally, this action will help mitigate the issue of overlapping selectivity among the current fishing gears. Our findings provide baseline data on the potential efficacy of gear limitation and suggest a gear-based management strategy.