You are a consultant who has been hired to help the province of Nova Scotia establish regulations for commercial cod fishing in their territorial waters. The problem is that you never actually know how many fish are out there or which species will dominate in a given year. People who depend on fishing for a living depend on you to set the limits high enough so they can make a decent living, but, if you set the limts too high, there is the danger that the fishery could collapse and the cod become extinct. In this exercise you will examine the logistic equation, an equation that models the fish population with no human intervention, and then compare it with two models for harvesting the fish, the constant-harvest model and the proportional harvesting model. You will then make a recommendation to the Novia Scotia Fisheries Commission about the benefits and problems with each of the models. You will then explore the role of bifurcation in this scenario in question 5.
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