Fishes in Databases and Ecosystems

Edited by Maria Lourdes D. Palomares, Konstantinos I. Stergiou and Daniel Pauly

This report was assembled for the 4th Annual FishBase Symposium, and also celebrates the 7th meeting of the FishBase Consortium, gathered for the second time outside of Europe (the first being at Los Baños, Philippines in 2003). Last year, the Consortium met at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, hosted by Consortium member K.I. Stergiou and his team, and the proceedings of that symposium were published two days before it was over. Here we tried to emulate this, but failed: this report was published two weeks after the event.

This report consists of 6 papers that were presented at the Symposium and 8 ‘relict’ papers, i.e., papers which, for various reasons, did not find their way into print right after they were originally written.

Typically, these papers, which here contain facts on the life history of fishes (growth, size at maturity, etc.) and/or parameter estimates that would be useful for FishBase and its user community, languish in the drawers of middle-aged scientists after rejection from a prestigious journal (“we don’t publish local studies”), or because they were just about, but never completely, finished. Such unpublished manuscripts, turned into ‘relict papers’ and published, are useful not only because they make available to the community a body of knowledge, acquired at great cost, which otherwise would be lost, but also because this knowledge refers to historical states of fish population or ecosystems, and thus can serve as baseline. Thus, relict papers can help counter the effects of shifting baselines.

Also, relict papers represent much of the personal knowledge of authors, a type of knowledge that is often lost upon their retirement. This loss has been identified in connection with taxonomists. It also happens, however, with other students of applied ichthyology, e.g., with stock assessment scientists, who usually know much more field biology than may be inferred from their equation-ridden papers.

Conventional peer-reviewed journals often have problems with the subject matter that would be typical of relict paper: they often cover topics viewed as pedestrian, such as age and growth studies of fish. Such studies, however, are the motor that drives comparative studies, meta-analysis and biodiversity studies, and evaluation of the impact of global change. Hence, this compilation of relict papers, if the first, is not the last to be published as a Fisheries Centre Research Reports.

Daniel Pauly
Director Fisheries Centre, UBC
02 September 2006

Abstract