ABSTRACT
Ignoring immigration, recruitment and individual growth are the major contributors to the production of biomass within a stock. Akin to the study of growth, some people have dedicated huge efforts toward investigating žsheries recruitment, especially the relationship between mature or spawning stock size and subsequent recruitment (Cushing, 1988; Myers and Barrowman, 1996; Myers, 2001). Recruitment to žsh populations naturally tends to be highly variable, and the main problem for žsheries scientists is whether recruitment is determined by the spawning stock size or environmental variation or some combination of both. To conduct stock assessments that include a risk assessment involves projecting the population forward in time, and this would require some notion of expected recruitment. To be able to do this, a minimum requirement is to have information about a stock’s productivity. Either estimates of a time series of recruitment levels or a stock recruitment relationship can be used for these purposes.
