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Indications that the state of European fish stocks is improving have been accumulating in recent years, yet it remained unclear how general this pattern is and whether these trends were driven by changes in fisheries regulations or fluctuations in stock productivity.
The Norwegian Spring-spawning herring (Clupea harengus) is a silvery forage fish belonging to the family of the Clupeidae.
Fishing gears are designed to exploit the natural behaviours of fish, and there is concern that fishing may lead to their evolution. However, predicting the effects of behavioural-selection is not always intuitive. In a recent paper accepted in Ecology & Evolution (Claireaux et al., In press) we try to clarify how behaviour-selective fishing affects the optimal behaviour, life-history traits and natural mortality of exploited populations.
The ConEvolHer project is approaching its end this year, which was setting the stage for a final project meeting in Bergen on May 30 and 31. The meeting was attended by all national and international project partners and was used as an opportunity to present recent scientific results relevant to the project, tackle current challenges and outline future research plans. Productive discussions were facilitated by beautiful weather and initiated perfectly the final stage of ConEvolHer.
New ConEvolHer article: Although population regulation is a central concept in ecology, it is surprisingly difficult to detect it empirically. In marine fish populations, it is commonly assumed that the main source of regulation is density-dependent recruitment, which is based on a decreasing number of recruits per capita with increasing population size. Other sources of density dependence such as growth are known, however it is often no clear whether they are of importance.