Herring and ICES: a historical sketch of a few ideas and their linkages

Abstract Sinclair, M. 2009. Herring and ICES: a historical sketch of a few ideas and their linkages. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 1652–1661. This introduction to the Symposium on “Linking Herring” sketches the development of some ideas generated from herring research within an ICES context. The work of Committee A (1902–1908), under the leadership of Johan Hjort, led to a paradigm shift from “migration thinking” to “population thinking” as the interpretation of fluctuations in herring landings. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the focus on forecasting services for the herring fisheries, although ultimately unsuccessful, had the unintended consequence of generating ideas on recruitment overfishing and the match–mismatch hypothesis. The collapse of the East Anglian fishery led, in 1956, to considerable debate on its causes, but no consensus was reached. Three consecutive symposia dealing with herring (1961, 1968, and 1970) reveal a changing perspective on the role of fishing on recruitment dynamics, culminating in Cushing’s 1975 book (“Marine Ecology and Fisheries”, referred to here as the “Grand Synthesis”), which defined the concept of recruitment overfishing and established the future agenda for fisheries oceanography. The 1978 ICES “Symposium on the Assessment and Management of Pelagic Fish Stocks” is interpreted as the “Aberdeen Consensus” (i.e. without effective management, recruitment overfishing is to be expected). In conclusion, herring research within ICES has led to many ideas and two major paradigm shifts.