Fishing strategies

Been reading/hearing Callum Roberts' An Unnatural History of the Sea, which documents the millenium-long history of our overexploitation of marine resources. Which makes this new paper in PNAS more intruiging. It suggests that we may be using the wrong model. The buzz-phrase these days is "ecosystem-based fisheries management", an approach designed to minimize the impact of fishing on marine ecosystems. The prevailing line of thought in such fisheries has been to employ highly selective methods that remove only certain species of specific sizes. The new work from a group of authors led by Shijie Zhou of CSIRO suggests that less selective methods might actually have lower impact. Zhou suggests that "production could actually increase through the better use of non-target species, while reducing unsustainably high catches of target species...".