Shifting dynamic forces in fish stock fluctuations triggered by age truncation?
By Tristan Rouyer, Geir Ottersen, J. M. Durant, M. Hidalgo, D. Hjermann, Jonas Persson, L. Stige, Nils Chr. Stenseth. 2011
100 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Accumulating evidence shows that environmental fluctuations and exploitation jointly affect marine fish populations, and understanding their interaction is a key issue for fisheries ecology. In particular, it has been proposed that age truncation induced by fisheries exploitation may increase the population's sensitivity to climate. In this study, we use unique long‐term abundance data for the Northeast Arctic stock of cod (Gadus morhua) and the Norwegian Spring‐Spawning stock of herring (Clupea harengus), which we analyze using techniques based on age‐structured population matrices. After identifying time periods with different age distributions in the spawning stock, we use linear models to quantify the relative effect of exploitation and temperature on the population growth rates. For the two populations, age truncation was found to be associated with an increasing importance of temperature and a relatively decreasing importance of exploitation, while the population growth rate became increasingly sensitive to recruitment variations. The results suggested that the removal of older age classes reduced the buffering capacity of the population, thereby making the population growth rate more dependent on recruitment than adult survival and increasing the effect of environmental fluctuations. Age structure appeared as a key characteristic that can affect the response of fish stocks to climate variations and its consequences may be of key importance for conservation and management.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4579222da8dcfd7712a39e5cf960f39639638677
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Fast versus slow growing tuna species: age, growth, and implications for population dynamics and fisheries management (2017, background): “There is an increasing body of evidence in fisheries biology showing the age-structure of longer-lived fish species (such as haddock and Atlantic cod) has an effect on the productivity and stability of populations by increasing their capacity to sustain long periods of unsuccessful recruitment and i”
- Rethinking length-based fisheries regulations: the value of protecting old and large fish with harvest slots (2015, background): “The authors concluded that the mechanism with the most support was that age truncation due to size-selective exploitation causes increased fluctuations in fish abundance (see also Hidalgo et al. 2011; Rouyer et al. 2011).”