Institutional amnesia pushes fish spawning aggregations towards extirpation

Abstract

Abstract How institutions create and manage knowledge has been explored in the context of management and business science. However, little effort has been made to understand how, and why, these institutions forget what works or does not work, and no research in this field has been conducted in conservation or fisheries science. This paper examines the concept of institutional amnesia by focussing a lens on fish spawning aggregations and efforts to monitor and protect them in the Mesoamerican Reef. For over 20 years, underwater visual census survey data has been collected periodically at 36 spawning aggregation sites, and grey literature is available since the 1940's, yet managers and conservation practitioners report that abundance tendencies for 48% of grouper and snapper spawning species across the 36 sites are ‘Unknown’, despite measurable >99% declines in fish abundance in some cases. This text examines the reasons why site managers are uncertain in their reporting. The central argument is that institutional amnesia (resulting from factors such as staff turnover, ineffective institutional learning, poor record keeping and a lack of storytelling) is contributing to suboptimal ecological outcomes for spawning aggregations, which are likely to continue unless measures are taken to ensure the continuity of institutional knowledge. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Keywords

• institutional amnesia
• marine conservation
• shifting baselines