Project Summary

Individual growth of fishes is an ideal parameter to measure organisms’ response to environmental change as it is sensitive to a range of drivers including direct temperature effects on physiology, food web changes and fishing intensity as well as playing a fundamental role in determining fitness. Long term observations of past variations of growth rate in nature can provide unprecedented information on biological responses on spatiotemporal scales not possible with other approaches. One means of obtaining such long term data is by examining fish otoliths that have been archived over the last decades by fisheries agencies worldwide due to their importance in stock assessment and fisheries management. Otoliths are natural recorders of environmental variability and growth (analogous to tree rings), and can be used to develop long term biochronologies (biological time series). Even though their relationship with environmental drivers such as changes in upwelling intensity, sea temperature, and global climate signals (e.g. Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)) has been successfully demonstrated, biochronologies developed from otoliths are still a underutilized source of information for climate change studies in the marine environment.