Via the American Association for the Advancement of Science' EurekAlert:
When making choices, people tend either to go with what they know or
try something new. We experience this trade-off every day, whether
choosing a route to work or buying breakfast cereal. But does one
strategy have an advantage over another? Researchers decided to examine
this question by looking at fishing boat captains, who face this choice
again and again when deciding where to fish.
To find out which strategy leads to greater success in the real
world, scientists from the University of California, Davis, and their
coauthors examined 540,000 fishing vessel position records from nearly
2,500 commercial fishing trips in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, along with
their revenues. The results are published today in the journal Nature Communications.
"It looks like exploration pays off in the face of uncertainty,"
said co-leading author Shay O'Farrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the
lab of Professor James Sanchirico from the UC Davis Department of
Environmental Science and Policy. "This is particularly important in the
context of global environmental change, when disturbances such as
storms and droughts are predicted to increase."
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The study found that some vessels consistently explore new
territory more than others and invest more time and resources into
sampling new places to fish. In times of stability, exploratory vessels
performed no better or worse on average than vessels that stuck with
consistency.
"In relatively stable environments, we would expect that any gains
from switching behaviors would usually go away, otherwise vessels would
be changing how they fish," Sanchirico said.
But when boats were suddenly forced to fish elsewhere during a 2009
closure of popular fishing grounds in the Gulf, those with a history of
exploration experienced significantly less impact from the disruption.
That may be because the boat captains could draw from their history of
exploration to select new grounds....MORE
