Managing and giving advice for mixed‐population fisheries of the same species can be challenging due to difficulties in predicting stock mixing, technical interactions, and in ensuring precautionary stock dynamics. Most fish species consist of several populations all of which need to be sustainably managed to preserve biodiversity and resilience to environmental changes, and to sustain productive fisheries. Mixing of populatio...

Understanding the drivers behind fluctuations in fish populations remains a key objective in fishery science. Our predictive capacity to explain these fluctuations is still relatively low, due to the amalgam of interacting bottom-up and top-down factors, which vary across time and space among and within populations. Gaining a mechanistic understanding of these recruitment drivers requires a holistic approach, combining field,...

In marine fishes, the timing of spawning determines the environment offspring will face and, therefore, the chances of early life stage survival. Different waves of Atlantic herring Clupea harengus spawn throughout spring in the western Baltic Sea, and the survival of offspring from early in the season has been low in the most recent decade. The authors assessed changes in egg traits from early, middle and late phases of the s...

Native to the Ponto-Caspian region, the benthic round goby ( Neogobius melanostomus ) has invaded several European inland waterbodies as well as the North American Great Lakes and the Baltic Sea. The species is capable of reaching very high densities in the invaded ecosystems, with not only evidence for significant food-web effects on the native biota and habitats, but also negative implications to coastal fishers. Although ge...

Shallow estuaries, bays, and lagoons are generally considered hot spots of ocean productivity that often adjust rapidly to seasonal variations in atmospheric temperatures. During spring when biological reproductive processes begin in the temperate zones, regional climate variability can be immense and uncovering a non-linear biological response, such as fish recruitment to changing temperature regimes might be challenging. Usi...

Atlantic herring ( Clupea harengus ) migrates from offshore to coastal areas to spawn and their eggs and larvae may substantially increase prey resources for resident predators. We combined an in situ predator exclusion experiment using eggs naturally spawned on submerged aquatic vegetation and field observations of predator abundance to estimate the magnitude of predation mortality of herring eggs. During our predator exclusi...

We analyzed the predation of threespine stickleback ( Gasterosteus aculeatus ) on the spawn of Atlantic herring ( Clupea harengus ) in a mesohaline lagoon of the Baltic Sea, hypothesizing a significant predation effect of a resident estuarine fish on the recruitment of an anadromous oceanic species. A predator exclusion field experiment using artificially spawned experimental units was combined with tank feeding experiments to...

Variation in growth and body size during critical life history stages can have important implications for life history schedules and survivorship. For P acific herring ( Clupea pallasii ), there is still debate as to whether juvenile body size is governed by density‐dependent or ‐independent processes and few have evaluated whether the relative importance of either process shifts over the course of early ontogeny. We used a un...