Fish sPAwner – Recruit relationship. Evaluating ENvironmental divers and beHaviOural traits Over life stages with Diverging spatial ecology

Traditional fisheries management assumes population growth is driven by adult abundance and/or fecundity, similar to terrestrial vertebrates.

However, marine fish have complex spawner-recruit systems made up of many traits which differ from terrestrial animals and drive species-specific productivity.

This includes extreme fecundity, early life dispersal, spawning site selection, and reproductive behavior such as aggregate spawning.

The “reproductive resilience paradigm” (RRP) recognizes these differences and evaluates a suite of fixed, behavioral, and varying traits (based on ecological context) to assess a stock’s vulnerability and productivity.

The goal of this project is to apply the principles of the RRP to a species that has been monitored over the long term and has well-documented reproductive behaviors and diverging spatial ecology throughout its life cycle.

This data will be used to model movements associated with spawning site selection and reproductive timing, which data will then be integrated into an early life dispersal model. Results will be ground-truthed through juvenile abundance indices and genetic parentage analyses.

This ecosystem-based approach, based on the RRP, is on the cutting edge of understanding spawner-recruit relationships, and ultimately being able to predict future fishery productivity, crucial components for sustainable fisheries management in the Anthropocene.