People Papers Results Department of Fisheries and Oceans NSERC Memorial University

This is the homepage for an NSERC strategic grant funded program exploring the connectivity of four different fish in Newfoundland waters: cod, sculpin, smelt and capelin. The need to manage and conserve marine living resources more effectively in Canada is underscored by the collapse of many commercial fisheries and the increasing number of species listed as threatened or endangered. Managers have been hindered by a lack of knowledge on whether populations of a given species should be treated as a single unit or whether some subpopulations of that species may be more important because they produce more successful offspring or seed adjacent populations. Recent advances in the study of the genetic similarity of populations and the microchemistry of fish otoliths (bone structures in the ear) offer two new tools that have the potential to identify the past history of individual fish, and the sorts of environments in which they lived as larvae, juvenile and adults. By pairing these novel techniques with physical oceanographic circulation modeling and measurements of larval and juvenile fish movements, we will determine how populations of different species of fishes with contrasting reproductive strategies are structured, which habitats are of greatest importance to different life stages, which subpopulations are interlinked, and the mechanism by which they are linked. This information will greatly enhance our capacity to conserve threatened species and manage commercial species sustainability. People Paul Snelgrove - a biological oceanography from the Ocean Sciences Center at Memorial University. Paul Bentzen - a population geneticist from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Brad deYoung - a physical oceanographer from Physics and Physical Oceanography at Memorial University. Claudio diBacco - a larval ecologist from Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Bob Gregory - a fisheries oceanographer from the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Center, a laboratory of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in St. John’s. David Pike - a mathematician from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Memorial University. Ian Bradbury - a PhD candidate in Biology at Dalhousie University. Papers This is the proposal - what we said that we would do Scaling of connectivity in marine populations - Cowen et al. Science 2006 A general model for designing networks of marine reserves – Sala et al. Science 2002 Larval dispersal on the Great Barrier Reef - Bode et al. MEPS 2006 Comment on Cowen article - Steneck Science 2006 Landscape connectivity as a function of scale - D'Eon et al. Conservation Ecology 2002 Landscape connectivity and graph theory - Bunn et al. J. Environmental Management 2000 Population graphs and genetic structure - Dyer and Nason - Molecular Ecology 2004 Landscape connectivity and (more) graph theory - Urban and Keitt Ecology 2001 Results We will place results from our work as they develop. The project is just beginning in the spring of 2006 so it will probably be a little while before things appear here.