143rd Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society

September 08 - 14, 2013

Management objectives are shifting from the optimization of yield to conservation and recovery of marine fish stocks.  This, in conjunction with the realization that stock assessments are oversimplifications of complex systems, has led to a call for a better understanding of biological processes and ecosystems.  Current harvest control rules are based on measures of single species productivity, but inter-generational estimates (i.e., stock-recruitment relationships) are notoriously poor, highlighting that a key knowledge gap in fisheries ecology and management is an understanding of the factors driving population productivity and the spatial scale over which they act.  Filling this knowledge gap will be difficult, given the scale of marine fish life cycles, high offspring mortality, and the somewhat insular nature of researchers focusing on different stages of life history.

 The American Fisheries Society annual meeting provides an excellent opportunity to bring together scientists from diverse fields to begin to meet this challenge.  Red drum were chosen as the case study for this symposium because: (1) fishing in federal waters has been closed for the past 20 years allowing population connectivity/adult spatial studies to be conducted on populations undisturbed by commercial fishing; (2) red drum is one of the first marine species spawned and reared in captivity, resulting in a better understanding of their reproductive behavior, egg quality, and factors affecting larval survivorship; (3) they are distributed throughout the Gulf and along the SE Atlantic, providing an opportunity to compare spatial behavior in different ecosystems; (4) management is based on subadult escapement rates; and (5) red drum have been the subject of intensive stock-enhancement efforts, resulting in extensive research on nursery and juvenile habitat and how it impacts survivorship.

 Subsections: (1) movements and population connectivity; (2) recruitment processes; (3) adult productivity and reproductive success; and (4) assessing productivity and future research needs.