Precaution in the harvest of Methuselah's clams - the difficulty of getting timely feedback from slow-paced dynamics

Geoduck (Panopea abrupta) stocks are perceived as stable and their fisheries as sustainable, but this may reflect a mismatch between slow-paced dynamics (maximum recorded age 168 years) and short-term perception. Management is based on biological reference points, whose appropriateness as a means to ensure sustainability is limited by a sedentary lifestyle and long-term trends in productivity. Analysis of age frequency distributions for 1979-1983, postharvest recovery rates measured in Washington in tracts pulse-fished during the 1980s and 1990s, and age frequency distributions compiled in British Columbia during the 1990s consistently suggest that recruitment declined for decades (long before the onset of the fishery), reaching a minimum around 1975, and rebounded afterwards. In such scenario, reliance on biological-reference-point-based harvest rules without timely feedback could accelerate population declines, eventually driving an apparently sustainable fishery to collapse. The merits of approaches that rely on monitoring and feedback using data-driven decision rules are stressed. Transition from a biological-reference-point-based strategy to one based on monitoring and feedback will demand a shift in research focus to the design of practical monitoring programs and the evaluation of management procedures by means of simulations. For geoducks and other long-lived organisms, monitoring should integrate data informative at different temporal scales.