Title:

The effects of urbanization and industry on cephalopod population dynamics

Small-scale fisheries are largely understudied and are often omitted from global harvest counts. They provide vital nutrition for millions of people and are some of the most vulnerable fisheries to anthropogenic impacts such as urbanization and climate change. Madagascar’s southern coasts are one such example, where local people have deep cultural ties to fishing. Recently, international export markets have contributed to overfishing of many species in the area, especially cephalopods. Despite being the largest export from Madagascar’s fisheries, very few population modeling studies have been conducted on the cephalopod population of Madagascar. This project aims to understand how this cephalopod community dynamics act under different levels of harvest and protection. We will fit stage-based Leslie matrix models to existing catch data in order to predict changes in population growth rate with the aim to identify key spawning seasons for Madagascar’s cephalopods. We predict that, contrary to their temporal counterparts’ biannual spawning pattern, this fishery actually spawns continuously throughout the year, which will help inform when fishing protections should be implemented. Further, we plan on incorporating different fishing methods and gender dynamics into existing socio-ecological models to better reflect Madagascar’s fishing population. In this study, we hope to reframe socio-ecological models to reflect specific cultural aspects of the society in question and use this to improve the sustainability of conservation methods.

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