Declinación de los condrictios del ecosistema costero de Uruguay y norte de Argentina

ANA M. MASSA; LUIS O. LUCIFORA; RANSOM A. MYERS

Itajaí

Workshop; V Reunião da Sociedade Brasileira para o Estudo dos Elasmobrânquios. Mesa Redonda: O Estado de Conservação dos Elasmobrânquios no Atlântico Sul Ocidental; 2006

Chondrichthyans (sharks, rays and chimaeras) can be easily depleted by commercial fishing. It has been hypothesized that chondrichthyans play a key role in the communities in which they live. However, little is known about how their depletion may affect the ecosystems in which they live, partly because of the lack of true baseline data on their abundance. Here, we assess changes in the chondrichthyan community from the inshore shelf (99%). These declines resulted in a 49.3% loss of average species richness and 30.7% of average functional richness. Our results are the first empirical data to show that overfishing of chondrichthyans, even as bycatch, may affect important ecosystem properties, such as functional diversity.