Abstract

Reproductive resilience has been defined as the capacity of a population to maintain the level of reproductive success needed to result in long-term population stability despite disturbances. Although reproductive success is tightly coupled with adult abundance and fecundity in many terrestrial animals, it may play less of a role in marine exploited fish which typically produce millions of pelagic eggs (Lowerre-Barbieri et al. 2016). In fisheries science, reproductive potential is the annual variation in a stock’s ability to produce viable eggs and larvae that may eventually recruit to the adult population or fishery (Trippel 1999) and thus a measure of reproductive success. Reproductive potential is traditionally measured as female spawning stock biomass (SSB) or total egg production (TEP), but there is growing recognition of the need to integrate a more eco-evolutionary perspective (Mangel et al. 2013, Kindsvater et al. 2016) and address other measures such as: spatial, temporal or demographic trends in reproductive value and sperm limitation in protogynous hermaphrodites (SEDAR 2015).

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