A stock–recruitment relationship based on pre-recruit survival, illustrated with application to spiny dogfish shark

Understanding the relationship between abundance of spawners and subsequent recruitment is one of the central issues in fisheries stock assessment. We developed a new, pre-recruit survival based stock–recruitment model that enables explicit modeling of survival between embryos and age 0 recruits, and allows the description of a wide range of pre-recruit survival curves. The model is especially useful for low fecundity species that produce relatively few offspring per litter and exhibit a more direct connection between spawning output and recruitment than species generating millions of eggs. The proposed model provides additional flexibility in the stock–recruitment options that may be explored in any fishery stock assessment, and it is now available within the Stock Synthesis assessment platform. In this paper, we describe the mathematical formulation of the new stock–recruitment model, explain how this model can be specified within Stock Synthesis, and use it to model the stock–recruitment relationship of the spiny dogfish shark in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. We compare the results of the application of our new stock–recruitment model, with those from traditional Beverton–Holt relationship, and illustrate why the new approach is more appropriate for this species.

► We developed a new spawner-recruit model, based on offspring pre-recruit survival.
► The new model was incorporated into the Stock Synthesis modeling framework.
► The model was applied to describe spawner-recruit relationship of spiny dogfish shark.
► The advantages of the new model (and limitations of others) for low fecundity species are discussed and illustrated.