Sensitivities of Fish Life Histories to Climate and Food Web Structure

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The maturation schedules of freshwater fish vary on both ecological and evolutionary time scales. Recent work has shown that this variation can be understood in terms of optimal (i.e. fitness maximizing ) responses to (i) short term changes in the size structure and density of the prey field that supports life time growth patterns and (ii) long term changes in climatic conditions and life time mortality schedules. The research program proposed here will build on this work by: (i) empirical comparisons of factors affecting the size structure of North American and European limnetic fish communities, with a particular focus on the influence of life history variation among top predators; (ii) extending existing models of the bioenergetic trade-offs that underlie phenotypic plasticity in the life history of top predators; (ii) testing these models against empirical data on life history variation observed in several freshwater fish species that are subject to both recreational and commercial fisheries; (iii) using these models to develop robust rules for estimating sustainable exploitation rates across the broad climatic gradients experienced by populations of these species in North America.