| Connectivity during early life stages of pelagic fish, defined here by survival probability between spawning and early juvenile habitats, depends on a combination of sufficient food availability and low predator encounter along drift trajectories. For anchovy in the Bay of Biscay, larval transport experiments throughout the spawning season suggest accumulation of early juveniles in the offshore area of the southern Bay, as well as retention over the mid-shelf at mid-latitude. However, late summer-early autumn surveys suggest presence of juveniles only in the former region. From this observation, we set up a bioenergetic individual based model to test for the effect of food availability on survival patterns. The model couples a Lagrangian transport module... |
