Early Life History and Fisheries Oceanography: New Questions in a Changing World

To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Oceanography Society and can be found at: http://tos.org/oceanography/index.html.In the past 100 years since the birth of fisheries oceanography, research\ud on the early life history of fishes, particularly the larval stage, has been extensive, and\ud much progress has been made in identifying the mechanisms by which factors such\ud as feeding success, predation, or dispersal can influence larval survival. However, in\ud recent years, the study of fish early life history has undergone a major and, arguably,\ud necessary shift, resulting in a growing body of research aimed at understanding the\ud consequences of climate change and other anthropogenically induced stressors. Here,\ud we review these efforts, focusing on the ways in which fish early life stages are directly\ud and indirectly affected by increasing temperature; increasing CO₂ concentrations, and\ud ocean acidification; spatial, temporal, and magnitude changes in secondary production\ud and spawning; and the synergistic effects of fishing and climate change. We highlight\ud how these and other factors affect not only larval survivorship, but also the dispersal\ud of planktonic eggs and larvae, and thus the connectivity and replenishment of fish\ud subpopulations. While much of this work is in its infancy and many consequences are\ud speculative or entirely unknown, new modeling approaches are proving to be insightful\ud by predicting how early life stage survival may change in the future and how such\ud changes will impact economically and ecologically important fish populations