Breaking out of the Spawning Biomass Paradigm: Skipped Spawning, Multiple Spawning, and Other Plasticity in Reproductive Potential

The objective of this symposium is to examin how deviations from our traditional stock assessment assumptions about spawning frequency and variability in reproductive output matter to stock assessment definitions of reproductive potential.  Skipped spawning and multiple spawning have been observed in marine stocks and might be related to water temperature or ecoregion.  In addition, maternal effects and variability in levels of atresia can also influence reproductive output in nonlinear ways.  How to incorporate these biological traits into stock assessment models is a challenge that we will be faced with.  This symposium is asking scientists to present findings on stocks with nontraditional spawning patterns or variability in reproductive output in an effort to reexamine the paradigm of spawning stock biomass and attempt to incorporate variability in reproductive output into the stock assessment models.