| Fishing is an important source of mortality in harvested populations and therefore may induce adaptive responses. These responses affect life-history traits in particular, which have consequences for stocks’ dynamics, and thus can alter the demographic direct effect of fishing (i.e. the reduction in stock’s biomass). Fishing-induced adaptive changes depend, non-exclusively, on two processes: evolution and phenotypic plasticity. These two components are observed at the phenotypic level because functional genes coding for the traits undergoing adaptive changes have not yet been identified. These two origins are confounded in individual phenotypes, and the impact of adaptive changes in the long run remains therefore unclear: evolutionary changes are expected... |
