News

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.

At this year’s ICES Annual Science Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, session P on recruitment dynamics, organized and co-convened by ConEvolHer, took place on the first two days of the conference. The session featured 20 presentations on a wide range of topics from fundamental biology of recruitment to spatial processes that are crucial for recruitment success and implementations of recruitment dynamics in stock assessment. The session concluded with a panel discussion of four distinguished experts, focussing on ways to move forward in understanding recruitment dynamics and implement them better in a management context.

This year’s ICES Annual Science Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, will start this Monday 18th of September and so will the session P convened by ConEvolHer. The session will contain 20 presentations, including a keynote presentation of Stephan B. Munch (NOAA/UCSC), and a range of poster presentations as well as panel discussion.

Marion Claireaux , (ConEvolHer), Fabian Zimmermann (ConEvolHer) and Nikos Nikolioudakis (EcoNorSe ) crossed the Atlantic to participate in the joint ICES/PICES Symposium on Drivers of dynamics of small pelagic fish resources in Victoria, Canada. The Symposium was full of captivating presentations, summing up the knowledge about small pelagics over the world, from the last 35 years, when such a gathering was last held. Marion, Fabian and Nikos also caught up with old colleagues and got to meet new for promising future collaborations.

As trade-offs are inevitable among the objectives in fisheries management, the maximization of yield from a fishery is traditionally considered to be in conflict with the mitigation of its evolutionary impacts. However, this perspective focuses mostly on fishing mortality alone, whereas modern fisheries management often neglects the role of gear selectivity. In a new study published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, ConEvolHer members Fabian Zimmermann and Christian Jørgensen investigated in Northeast Arctic cod how fishing gear and size selective fishing affects population dynamics, catch and potential trade-offs between management objectives.

At this year’s ICES Annual Science Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, ConEvolHer will be present with its own session.  Session P on recruitment dynamics in a changing environment takes up one of the project’s key question, the drivers of recruitment variability and impacts on stock assessment and management. The session will be convened by ConEvolHer members Katja Enberg and Fabian Zimmermann together with LaTreese Denson (USA). The call for abstracts is now open!