Impact of maximum sustainable yield on competitive community

A system of n competing logistical species of the Volterra type under proportional harvesting strategy is analyzed. In case of selective harvesting, when the effort is adjusted to each species, the optimum effort may result in the total maximum sustainable yield (TMSY1). When it exists, reaching TMSY1 does not affect the system stability character, but it does affect the state, and hence some populations may reach too small a value to persist in nature. If competition is strong, species with smaller biotic potential may be driven to extinction. In case the system is harvested with a common harvesting effort, such as in trawler fishery, the total maximum sustainable yield (TMSY2) is smaller than TMSY1, and all the species with lower or equal biotic potential to the optimum harvesting effort will be driven to extinction. In this case a call for implementation of the MSY is equivalent to a call for the extermination of some species and it runs directly against the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992). Therefore, all legal documents advocating MSY in ecosystems starting with the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPI, 2002) must be urgently retracted and replaced with adaptive management which will respect CBD.

► A system of n competing populations under proportional harvesting strategy is analyzed. ► When harvesting is selective, before reaching MSY, probably some species will disappear. ► In case of nonselective harvesting, before reaching MSY, species with r≤eopt will disappear.