Rapid evolution of dispersal and marine reserves

Background/Question/Methods

Marine reserve networks can be established for conservation or fisheries management purposes.  They may also emerge as part of a management strategy designed to maximize profit.  As is appropriate, the mathematical models that are currently used to understand the economic and biological costs and benefits of marine reserves make a number of simplifying assumptions.  Among these is that fishing generates no selective pressure on the dispersal behavior of fish.  Nevertheless, the sharp spatial gradients in mortality that marine reserves can create suggest that such pressures are not unlikely.  Whether harvesting strategies that involve marine reserves operate as designed in the face of rapidly evolving dispersal behavior is an open question.

Results/Conclusions

We have augmented a simple, spatially-explicit, mathematical model that incorporates standard bioeconomic assumptions with the possibility that dispersal may evolve.  Our analyses of this model show that, at steady-state, economically optimal reserves in the absence of evolution are unlikely to remain optimal when dispersal evolves.