Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Atlantic Menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) Recruitment in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean
May 11, 2020
Menhaden is an abundant and important clupeid fish show a large variety in number of fish that survive to enter a fishery (recruitment). The underlying drivers and spatial patterns of variability are not well understood but researched in this study.
Atlantic menhaden, Brevoortia tyrannus, is an abundant, schooling pelagic fish that is widely distributed in the coastal Northwest Atlantic. It supports the largest single-species fishery by volume on the east coast of the United States. However, relatively little is known about factors that control recruitment (fish recruitment is the number of fish that survive to enter a fishery), and its stock–recruitment relationship is poorly defined. Atlantic menhaden is managed as a single unit stock, but fisheries and environmental variables likely act regionally on recruitments. To better understand spatial and temporal variability in recruitment, fishery-independent time-series (1959–2013) of young-of-year abundance indices from the Mid-Atlantic to Southern New England were analysed using dynamic factor analysis and generalized additive models.
Andrew Buchheister, Thomas J. Miller, Edward D. Houde, David H. Secor, Robert J. Latour. 2016. Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Atlantic Menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) Recruitment in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Published in ICES Journal of Marine Science, Volume 73, Issue 4, March/April 2016, pages 1147–1159. https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsv260.