Life History Variability in Marine Fish: Climate and Fishing Induced Controls

Over the last decades, exploited marine fish stocks have shown pronounced changes in vital rates and life history characteristics such as body size- and mass-at-age, maturity schedules and reproductive potential. These changes, whether driven by plastic responses to shifts in environmental conditions, population density or genetic-based adaptive responses to harvesting, must be better understood in order to develop sustainable harvest strategies over multi-generational time scales. Life history variability in marine fish and the control mechanism(s) responsible have been investigated in controlled laboratory studies, in retrospective observational studies and in theoretical models.  Yet despite these efforts there remains a great deal of scientific uncertainty regarding why some stocks show greater variability than others, whether patterns across multiple stages and species show synchronous population responses to environmental variability, which factors exert most control and at what life stage, and what is the functional response between controlling factor and variable life history trait. The symposium's goal is to provide a forum for the communication of research and contemporary discussion of these fundamental responses and how knowledge of them can inform the management of marine living resources.