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Tropical soft-bottom communities-complex associations of fish and inverte- brates living on the smooth Continental Shelf areas between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn-are both a marine ecologist's dream and a nightmare. They are a dream because their wide variety of species adaptations and life- history strategies implies myriads of possible interactions and allows the foun- dation of large numbers of hypotheses about them, just as in the case of tropical rain forests.2 They are a nightmare because testing such hypotheses, besides being intrinsically difficult (more so, because of the watery medium, than in the case of tropical rain forests), generally requires data, such as long time series of species abundances, that usually do not exist.3 3 Dream or nightmare, however, ecologists must wake up to the fact that tropical soft-bottom communities, being eminently trawlable, are, throughout most of the world, highly exploited resources. In fact, trawl fisheries based on these communities have in the last 25 years not only gone through an ex- tremely rapid-almost explosive-development, but many of them have in- deed become paradigms of overfishing and overcapitalization.4 4 Until the end of the 1970s and possibly later, laments about the lack of scientific tools to deal
Ocean Yearbook Online – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1986
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