Trial lecture: 'Assessing and managing Barents Sea fish: capelin and cod as example'
Time and place: Jan. 24, 2025 10:15 AM, Nucleus, Bikuben, Kristine Bonnevies hus
Main research findings:
In ecology, we try to answer how many individuals of a species we have in a population. In fisheries science, we want to know how many fish there are to be able to set good management and conservation goals and fish quotas. In my PhD-thesis I have investigated fish abundance in the Barents Sea. The work fits into a long line of investigations that point one bottleneck for our understanding of the dynamics determining the number of fish: the early stages of fish life. In my thesis, I focused on several of the hypotheses for mortality in fish eggs and larvae. I find great variation in use of spawning sites for mature fish, which might impact the size of young fish and thus their survival probability. Further, I have investigated jellyfish predation as a highly variable source of mortality. Lastly, the thesis also tries to detangle the individual effects of fisheries, predation, temperature and food availability on fish population dynamics, and the importance of the number of adult fish that get to spawn. The work confirmed the difficulty, but high importance, of accurately estimating the number of young fish in a population.
Adjudication committee
Prof. Teunis Jansen, National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Technical University of Denmark
Prof. Katja Enberg, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen
Prof. Atle Mysterud, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo
Chair of defense
Prof. Bente Edvardsen, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo
Supervisors
Prof. Øystein Langangen, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo
Prof. Josefin Titelman, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo
Researcher Joël Marcel Durant, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo