Abstract
Marine fish are adapted to place their eggs and larvae in favourable locations and times in the season. This constrains their spatial distribution and drives spawning- and feeding migrations, and have major implications on life history strategies such as energy allocation between growth, reproduction and storage. The importance of being born at the right position in space and time depends on oceanography, but also on larval fish behaviour. Pelagic environments are highly structured in the vertical – light, temperature, and currents constitute gradients that even larval fish can exploit to enhance survival, growth and retention. These gradients may also involve dilemmas for larvae and juveniles, since they frequently have to choose between maximising growth, survival or retention through habitat selection. The advent of fine-grained oceanographic circulation models have now made it possible to study these trade-offs, and to explore fitness-consequences of time and place of birth, including behavioural strategies of larvae. An understanding of offspring fitness as a function of where and when they are born is also a key element to understand parental behaviour (migrations) and life history strategies. There is therefore an intimate link between larval ecology and parental life history traits. I will discuss methods to model the full life cycle of fish, and give examples from own work on both larval and juvenile/adult fish. I will emphasise the need for a broader understanding of fish life histories in the context of fisheries-induced evolution of life-history traits and the potential for alterations in circulation- and productivity patterns in response to climate change.
Other information
The CEES seminar room has a coffee-machine – it is therefore recommended that you come a bit earlier and get yourself a good cup of coffee (for the price of 3 NOK).