Early life survival is critical to successful replenishment of fish populations, and hypotheses developed under the Growth‐Survival Paradigm (GSP) have guided investigations of controlling processes. The GSP postulates that recruitment depends on growth and mortality rates during early life stages, as well as their duration, after which the mortality declines substantially. The GSP predicts a shift in the frequency distributio...

Several years of monitoring in the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago contrast with a lack of repeated measurements in Queen Maud Gulf. As sea ice cover declines and maritime traffic increases along the Northwest Passage, Queen Maud Gulf, including the protected national historic sites of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror wrecks, may experience drastic environmental changes. As part of the Kitikmeot Marine Ecosystems Study, moor...

A 2-year-long time series of currents and acoustic backscatter from an acoustic Doppler current profiler, moored over the eastern Beaufort Sea continental slope from October 2003 to September 2005, were used to assess the dynamics and variability of the sound-scattering layer. It has been shown that acoustic backscatter is dominated by a synchronized diel vertical migration (DVM) of zooplankton. Our results show that DVM timin...

Understanding the feeding ecology of polar cod ( Boreogadus saida ) during its first year of life is crucial to forecasting its response to the ongoing borealization of Arctic seas. We investigated the relationships between diet composition and feeding success in 1797 polar cod larvae and juveniles 4.5–55.6 mm standard length (SL) collected in five Arctic seas from 1993 to 2009. Prey were identified to species and developmenta...

Previous work found that an earlier ice breakup favors the recruitment of juvenile polar cod ( Boreogadus saida ) by enabling early hatchers to survive and reach a large size by late summer thanks to a long growth season. We tested the hypothesis that, in addition to a long growth season, an earlier ice breakup provides superior feeding conditions for young polar cod by enhancing microalgal and zooplankton production over the...

In the Arctic Ocean, vertical fluxes of particulate organic carbon (POC) remain low during the dark winter period because POC fluxes are derived from photosynthetic production. Passively sinking dead copepods are traditionally excluded from POC fluxes estimated using sediment traps, resulting in the underestimation of the total POC flux. Here, we present the seasonal variability of total POC export flux measured by a sediment...