MdM Keynote Speaker Series: "How Sustainable are Polar Fisheries? A Deep Time view of Global Fish Production", by Richard Norris

Richard Norris, University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, will be giving a keynote on "How Sustainable are Polar Fisheries? A Deep Time view of Global Fish Production”.
 

MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2024 
 

Title: "How Sustainable are Polar Fisheries? A Deep Time view of Global Fish Production”
 

Speakers: Richard Norris, University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
 

Date: Thursday, 7th of March 2023
Time: from 10:00 to 11:00
Venue: Sala Montseny /Z/022 & Z/023 and online: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87444872693?pwd=XmbtvxYyWgba2uyqde6I10aJOhGco8.1 
 

Polar waters can be enormously productive in the summer months with 24 hr sunlight.  Global fisheries have targeted populations of species such as Atlantic cod, Antarctic Toothfish and Orange Roughy. I examined the geologic record of fish productivity from ichthyoliths to assess whether heightened polar biological production can sustain high catches. I find, over the last 70 million years, that polar fish production is consistently less than 1/10th that of the tropical and subtropical oceans.  There are many ecological reasons for this latitudinal disparity in production but they largely come down to plummeting production during the dark Winter months and the necessity for polar fish to mostly be long lived and slow growing. I find that polar fish populations can sustain only a tiny fraction of the fishing effort of a sustainable low latitude fishery.  Further, the notion that polar ecosystems are richly productive thanks to diatom-krill-based ecosystems is false when integrating the full seasonal cycle or longer time frames.  Polar seas are effectively biological deserts that are briefly productive during a Spring production peak in an analogous situation of "superblooms" in terrestrial deserts.  
 

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY and RESEARCH INTERESTS 

Richard Norris is a professor of paleobiology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the evolution of life in the oceans, with particular emphasis on the mechanisms of extinction and speciation of plankton and the processes of assembly of marine ecosystems. I use ecological, genetic, and biogeographic studies of living plankton and pelagic fish as well as the extensive fossil record of marine plankton and fish preserved in deep sea sediments.