National Marine 
Fisheries Service 
NOAA 
Fishery Bulletin 
@ established in 1881 «< 
Spencer F. Baird Ee ' 
First U.S. Commissioner he. 
of Fisheries and founder pe 
of Fishery Bulletin 
Abstract—We contend that harvest 
is a misleading term when referring 
to wild organisms removed from nat- 
ural systems and suggest that fishery 
professionals reserve the word for 
aquaculture products. When referring 
to wild stock extraction, replacing the 
word harvest with catch removes the 
implication of extractor entitlement, 
better indicates the fishery product 
source, and does not distract from the 
issue of bycatch. 
Manuscript submitted 24 August 2020. 
Manuscript accepted 9 December 2020. 
Fish. Bull. 119:1—2 (2021). 
Online publication date: 28 December 2020. 
doi: 10.7755/FB.119.1.1 
The views and opinions expressed or 
implied in this article are those of the 
author (or authors) and do not necessarily 
reflect the position of the National 
Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA. 
Use of the term harvest when referring to 
wild stock exploitation 
James A. Bohnsack 
Laura Jay W. Grove 
Joseph E. Serafy (contact author) 
Email address for contact author: joe.serafy@noaa.gov 
Southeast Fisheries Science Center 
National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA 
75 Virginia Beach Drive 
Miami, Florida 33149 
The fish harvest is not a harvest pro- 
duced by human labour. It is Nature’s 
gift—some would say God’s gift—to 
humanity (Archer, 1944). 
Words matter in all walks of life, includ- 
ing in fishery science. As professionals, 
we strive to communicate information 
clearly with many audiences, especially 
the public. Since at least the early 19th 
century (according to a search for the 
use of fish harvest during 1800-2019 
in the Google Books Ngram Viewer, 
available from website, accessed August 
2020; Michel et al., 2011), harvest has 
been used somewhat interchangeably 
with catch and landings. Likewise, har- 
vesting has been a synonym for fishing 
or collecting biota from natural waters. 
The glossary of fishery terms published 
by our own organization, the National 
Marine Fisheries Service, is replete 
with the word harvest when referring 
to removal of wild fish (NMFS, 2006). 
Certainly, dictionary definitions allow 
for the use of harvest (in noun and 
verb form) to apply to a given biomass 
extracted from a natural system, and 
to the act of gathering that biomass. 
However, primary dictionary defini- 
tions of harvest (Merriam-Webster') and 
1 Merriam-Webster. 2020. Harvest. Merriam- 
Webster.com. [Available from website, 
accessed August 2020.] 
harvesting (Merriam-Webster”) typ- 
ically evoke agriculture, and we feel 
such definitions transmit several con- 
notations that are subtlety misleading, 
particularly to non-practitioners. Here, 
we suggest that fishery professionals 
reserve the word harvest for reference to 
fish, invertebrates, and algae produced 
through aquaculture, and we explain 
why its usage makes us wince a little 
when it is applied to wild catches. 
In fisheries, catch constitutes all 
organisms permanently or temporarily 
extracted from natural ecological com- 
munities, and landings are the portion 
of catch retained. Wild fish populations 
are not crops that were sowed and 
nurtured by people, for people. There- 
fore, labelling wild catches as harvests 
attaches undue human entitlement to 
the donor populations and the natural 
ecosystems of which they are a part. 
Typically, what is extracted comes from 
populations that have existed for mil- 
lennia, before human extraction began, 
and that would likely thrive well into 
the future were they not depleted by 
fishing or anthropogenic modification 
of their habitats. They persist in spite 
of humans, not because of humans, with 
most modern examples of successful 
” Merriam-Webster. 2020. Harvesting. 
Merriam-Webster.com. [Available from 
website, accessed August 2020.] 
