Wednesday April 30, 2025
Anthropocene —
Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing commercial fishing inside nearly 1.3 million square kilometers of protected waters in the Pacific Ocean. The order, titled “Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific,” stated that “appropriately managed commercial fishing” wouldn’t harm the marine reserve.
But recent research some 5,000 kilometers from this patch of the Pacific illustrates how even limited amounts of fishing can upend the effectiveness of a marine reserve in coping with ecological upheavals such as an underwater heatwave.
While these coastal ecosystems are vastly different from open ocean habitats, the findings off a broader lesson about how protecting species such as key predators can shape the fate of an ecosystem.
“This analysis provides robust evidence that protecting marine predators promotes the recovery of marine forests even in the face of prolonged marine heat waves,” said Stanford University marine scientist Fiorenza Micheli, an author of the paper that appeared in the journal Global Change Biology at the end of 2024.