ABSTRACT
In fi sheries biology, recruitment is defi ned as the addition of new individuals to the harvested stock (Myers 2002). It is a fundamental concept in fi sheries research, as declines in the number of individuals reaching an age/size to constitute viable targets for the fi shery, will dictate restrictive measures on the fi shery. Such measures aim to warrant stock sustainability. Recruitment predictability has been a pivotal subject in fi sheries research, resulting in a plethora of studies on recruitment variability, studies that aim to disentangle mechanisms and processes driving recruitment patterns. Recruitment variability is the result of density dependent and density independent, stochastic and deterministic factors; it is inextricably connected to adult population dynamics through reproduction, adult population abundance, survival of early life stages and population growth rates. Perturbations caused at a population level are either the result or the cause of recruitment variability. Environmental, density independent parameters are assumed to induce recruitment variability, whereas density dependent processes have a stabilizing effect on recruitment (Cowan et al. 2000).
