Egg production methods in marine fisheries: An introduction

This paper is an introduction of the Fisheries Research special issue on egg production methods (EPM) that emerged from a dedicated workshop held in Athens, Greece, in 2010. The workshop considered if EPMs are still valid today, it reviewed recent developments in the methods and discussed the utility of EPMs in the future. Importantly, experts from both the daily and the annual egg production methods took part in the workshop. This introduction provides the main concepts underlying EPMs. It also gives a brief history of EPM development over the last two decades with examples of their use worldwide. It provides a review on whether EPMs have fulfilled their objectives. Given their increased utilisation on new fish stocks, and their contribution to scientific advances, EPMs continue to be useful. However, concerns about the bias and precision of the methods remain, and a continuous effort to improve those issues together with the cost-efficiency of the methods is still required.