Catch rates and income are associated with fisheries management restrictions and not an environmental disturbance, in a heavily exploited tropical fishery

We evaluated and compared the influence of the largest temperature anomaly in recent history, the 1997-1998 El Niño-Indian Ocean Dipole anomaly that killed half of the corals in the Indian Ocean, with a nearly coincident increase in fisheries management restrictions on coral reef fisheries in southern Kenya.Seawater temperatures, benthic primary producers, and fishing effort and catch rate and income time series collected over the 1993-2012 period were evaluated using time series and variable cointegration methods.An observed decline and subsequent increase in catch rates was closely associated with the implementation of increasing fisheries restrictions and was not predictably cointegrated with the temperature or the primary producer's time series.This may have occurred because the disturbance was pulsed with a limited 6 yr impact on the primary producers and the fishery was heavily utilized and composed of fastgrowing generalist species with broad diet and habitat needs.Consequently, under these conditions, promoting fisheries restrictions is expected to attenuate the predicted declines in fish catches projected by global warming.