CEPHALOPOD BIOMASS AND PRODUCTION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM

摘要

Worldwide interest has been generated in the apparently large biomass of cephalopods in the global oceans, its importance in marine food webs, especially at higher trophic levels, and to major international and regional fisheries (Clarke, 1996). Commercial fisheries globally take up to 3 million tonnes of cephalopods annually. This quantity has risen steadily over the last three decades, and the cephalopod resource categmy is one of few in which catches have increased during this period. At the same time, improved methods of species identification and size estimation of the cephalopods taken in the diet of many marine predators have suggested total removals by predators to be at least 100 fold greater than human fisheries.