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SMMR are pleased to host Jon Pitchford for the 2023 Webinar Series.

The talk will be 20-30 minutes long followed by 15 minutes of questions.

People like simple stories. They are easy to understand, efficient to communicate, and can be a very useful tool for getting people to agree. Unfortunately, if the stories are too simple then the agreements reached might actually be harmful. I will attempt to illustrate these ideas using mathematical models (which are just “stories”) for marine systems. I will cover some old descriptions of larval foraging and recruitment dynamics, where accidentally using the wrong model can lead to interesting insights in evolutionary ecology. This may or may not involve a dead gorilla. I will then describe some of the problems with Maximum Sustainable Yield agreements in fisheries, and discuss how developing size-based models and data could lead to practical new approaches to management.

Jon Pitchford is the PI of the SMMR project “Pyramids of Life: working with nature for a sustainable future”.