The paper is concerned with the optimal harvesting of a marine resource, described by an elliptic equation with Neumann boundary conditions and a nonlinear source term. We first consider a single agent, whose harvesting effort at various locations is described by a positive Radon measure. Necessary conditions for optimality are derived, complementing the existence result proved in [A. Bressan, G. Coclite, and W. Shen, SIAM T. Control Opton., 51 (2013), pp. 1186-1202]. The second part of the paper deals with a competitive scenario, where several groups of fishermen, from different coastal towns and hence with different cost functions, harvest the same marine resource. We prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium, which is characterized in terms of a suitable variational inequality.