Revisiting the concept of Beverton -Holt life-history invariants with the aim of informing data-poor fisheries assessment

By J. Prince, Adrian R. Hordyk, S. Valencia, N. Loneragan, K. Sainsbury. 2015

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The complexity and cost of assessment techniques prohibits their application to 90% of fisheries. Simple generic approaches are needed for the world’s small-scale and data-poor fisheries. This meta-analysis of the relationship between spawning potential and the normalized size and age of 123 marine species suggests that the so-called Beverton– Holt life-history invariants (BH-LHI; Lm/L1, M/k, M × Agem) actually vary together in relation to life-history strategy, determining the relationship between size, age, and reproductive potential for each species. Although little realized, the common assumption of unique values for the BH-LHI also implies that all species share the same relationship between size, age, and reproductive potential. This implicit assumption is not supported by this meta-analysis, which suggests that there is considerable but predictable natural variation in the BH-LHI ratios and the relationships between size, age, and reproductive potential that they determine. We believe that this reconceptualization of the BH-LHI has potential to provide a theoretical framework for “borrowing” knowledge from well-studied species to apply to related, unstudied species and populations, and when applied together with the assessment technique described by Hordyk et al. (this issue b), could make simple forms of size-based assessment possible for many currently unassessable fish stocks.

Subfields: Aquatic Science, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59b7a1f453ed06aa0f34a6a8d78753922b808b1f

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In Aquatic Science

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Citations in the corpus

A novel length-based empirical estimation method of spawning potential ratio (SPR), and tests of its performance, for small-scale, data-poor fisheries (2015, methodology): “In this study, we simulated length data from four species with diverse life histories, spanning the range of M/k (0.53 to 3.05) in the meta-analysis of Prince et al. (2015).”
Some explorations of the life history ratios to describe length composition, spawning-per-recruit, and the spawning potential ratio (2015, methodology): “By examining a wide range of M/k (0.3– 2.3), the results of this study show the important consequences of significant divergence from the BH-LHI, which have important consequences for management.”
Length based SPR assessment of eleven Indo-Pacific coral reef fish populations in Palau (2015, background): “…the theory of Beverton–Holt Life History Invariants (Beverton and Holt, 1959; Charnov, 1993) it is proposed that LB-SPR can be applied to relatively unstudied stocks, by ‘borrowing’ information about poorly studied species from the literature for taxonomically related species (Prince et al., 2014).”
A simple length-structured model based on life history ratios and incorporating size-dependent selectivity: application to spawning potential ratios for data-poor stocks (2016, methodology): “Values of M/K around 1.5 – 266 2.0 and lower appear to be most common (Prince et al. 2015b), and consequently we 267 examined a range of M/K ratios (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0) in the simulations, but used generic 268 default values for the other life history parameters (Table 1).”
Trends and management implications of human-influenced life-history changes in marine ectotherms (2016, background): “A promising new approach to reduce variation and improve predictive value of life-history 162 invariants is to derive these life-history ratios separately for species with different life-history strategies 163 (Prince et al. 2015).”