Recruitment Overfishing

Recruitment overfishing is reducing the spawning stock biomass to the point that it can no longer produce enough recruits to sustain the population, the more dangerous of the two overfishing modes. Unlike growth overfishing, which only forfeits yield from small fish, recruitment overfishing attacks reproductive capacity and can drive a stock toward collapse. It occurs when fishing mortality is held above sustainable levels long enough to push biomass below the limit reference point B_lim, where the stock-recruitment relationship steepens and recruitment falls. The remedy is cutting F below F_MSY and rebuilding spawning biomass toward B_MSY, near half the unfished level.