Strategy performance is assessed with respect to a conservation criterion, the revenues achieved and their variability. Strategies that harvest heavily, even when the population is apparently very large, perform badly in the robustness trials. Setting a threshold below which harvesting does not take place, and above which all individuals are harvested, does not provide effective protection against over-harvesting. Strategies that rely on population growth rates rather than estimates of population size are more robust to biased estimates. The strategies that are most robust to uncertainty are simple, involving harvesting a relatively small proportion of the population each year. The simulation modelling approach to exploring harvesting strategies is suggested as a useful tool for the assessment of the performance of competing strategies under uncertainty.