Journal
ICES JOURNAL OF MARINE SCIENCE
Volume 66, Issue 8, Pages 1667-1672Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/icesjms/fsp143
Keywords
Baltic Sea; herring larvae; year-class strength
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Weekly surveys of larvae in the Strelasund and the Greifswalder Bodden were used to investigate when year-class strength is determined in western Baltic spring-spawning (WBSS) herring. An abundance metric of larvae reaching a length of 20 mm over the entire spawning season was constructed by accounting for increases in daily growth resulting from seasonal increases in temperature (5-20 degrees C). The index was significantly correlated with the acoustic estimates of age-1 herring in the western Baltic Sea (r = 0.88) and with the estimates of year-class strength obtained from stock assessment (r = 0.65). Previous studies of herring elsewhere have reported that year-class strength is determined during the late larval stage, but we show that year-class strength can already be fixed at a larval length of only 20 mm. Although the index obtained may be used in stock assessment and predictions, the intriguing question remains, namely how can the signal of larval productivity from one single spawning component of WBSS herring reflect the year-class dynamics of the entire stock?
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available