| Coastal and estuarine habitats function as nurseries for many commercial marine species. In these ecosystems, the hypothesis that food supply limits juvenile fish density and survival has been widely debated. Direct approaches that test this hypothesis in temperate soft-bottom nurseries are data-intensive as they rely on beam trawl to collect juvenile fish and grab or core to collect their prey within the macrobenthic community. Thus, application has often been limited to a few sampling stations and temporal snapshots. However, scientific beam trawl surveys, conducted periodically in nurseries, sample, besides juvenile fish, benthic invertebrates including potential prey species. Using data collected solely from beam trawl surveys, we tested whether food... |
