Coastal zones are productive areas that serve as nursery grounds for a large number of marine species. However, the processes involved in survival success during the juvenile phase are not well‐known. Some authors suggest that the availability of prey is important to support the production of pre‐recruit fish whose fitness is enhanced through optimal feeding conditions. Accordingly, recruitment is limited by the carrying capac...

For many marine fish species, recruitment is strongly related to larval survival and dispersal to nursery areas. Simulating larval drift should help assessing the sensitivity of recruitment variability to early life history. An individual‐based model (IBM) coupled to a hydrodynamic model was used to simulate common sole larval supply from spawning areas to coastal and estuarine nursery grounds at the population scale in the ea...

Oceanic larvae of the European ( Anguilla anguilla ) and American ( A. rostrata ) eels have to cross the Atlantic Ocean from the Sargasso Sea to European or North American coasts before entering continental habitats. In some European rivers, eel recruitment is now

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 495–505 Abstract Primary production must constrain the amount of fish and invertebrates available to expanding fisheries; however the degree of limitation has only been demonstrated at regional scales to date. Here we show that phytoplanktonic primary production, estimated from an ocean‐colour satellite (SeaWiFS), is related to global fisheries catches at the scale of Large Marine Ecosystems, while a...

The migration duration of European eel ( Anguilla anguilla ) larvae (leptocephali) from the spawning areas in the Sargasso Sea to the European continental shelf remains highly controversial, with estimates varying from 6 months to more than 2 yr. We estimated the fastest migration period and the shortest distance travelled by eel larvae by simulating Lagrangian particles released in the Sargasso Sea and by simulating a range o...