My first experience of fisheries research was in 1965, when I
left school and spent six weeks on an Icelandic research cruise
doing a plankton and acoustic survey for Norwegian spring spawning
herring. I gained a 1st class Honours degree in Zoology
and Oceanography at UCNW, Bangor in 1968 and spent the following
year in the Indian Ocean, on Aldabra and Kenya, studying tides,
polychaetes and the infauna of live and dead coral.
My PhD (UEA, Norwich and Lowestoft) was on population dynamics
of cod in the Irish Sea and I started up the market sampling on a
number of commercial species at Fleetwood, Whitehaven, Conwy and
Milford Haven as the basis for fisheries assessments. The Irish Sea fisheries are very mixed, with
a large number of species contributing to the total catch, so I
used surplus production models on the total demersal catch as well
as single species assessments and models with multispecies and
mixed fishery effects, particularly for cod and Nephrops. I was in charge of fish stock assessment
around the south and west of England and Wales from 1975 and also
worked for FAO and the EC for short periods on collection of
fisheries statistics, effects of 200 mile limits and establishment
of the CFP. In 1978 I made a proposal that DG Fish should carry out
a trial of regional fisheries management but it took 35 years
before this was put in place. Two significant papers which came out
in 1980 were on the need for an integrated ecosystem approach to
management and on the disappearance of the common skate from the
Irish Sea due to fishing.
I had become disillusioned with the routine of fish stock
assessment, which seemed to do little more than add a scientific
veneer to an ineffective fisheries management system. It ignores environmental and ecosystem
effects and diverts scientific resources from investigation of
marine ecosystem functioning and operational research on overcoming
the problems of overfishing. I switched
to research on plankton, early life histories of fish and
recruitment, which led to involvement with GLOBEC, investigating
the effects of ocean physics on marine ecosystems, with a
particular emphasis on zooplankton and on the survival of early
life stages of fish. Over the course of the GLOBEC programme
(1990-2008) the emphasis changed steadily from climate variability
(at scales of years to decades) to climate change.
Apart from a period as Fisheries Science Adviser to the Ministry
of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now part of DEFRA) I worked on
the ICES/GLOBEC Cod and Climate Change programme from 1993, moving
to ICES as coordinator of the programme from 1996 to 2008 and then
to DTU Aqua in Charlottenlund until retirement in 2012.
Over the past six years the main emphasis of my research has
been on the synthesis and application of results. I was lead author for the fisheries and
marine ecosystem sections of the fourth IPCC report, for which we
were awarded a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace prize. I was the 2013
Johan Hjort Professor of Marine Ecosystem Research and I continue
to work and publish with scientists at DTU and from a number of
other countries.