Renaissance of a caveat: Allee effects in marine fish

Abstract

AbstractThe population dynamics of marine fish at low abundance has long been of interest. One century ago, Johan Hjort drew attention to the importance of understanding “the laws which govern the renewal of the animal population”. Integral to the current work on the recovery of collapsed fish stocks is the association between abundance and per capita population growth rate (r), a negative correlation being representative of compensation and a positive correlation indicative of an Allee effect, also termed depensation. Allee effects are predicted to slow the rate, and increase the uncertainty, of recovery. Based on studies having sufficient data at low abundance, the magnitude of depletion experienced by some fish populations appears to have been sufficient to have generated either an Allee effect or a transition from strong to weak (or absent) compensatory dynamics. To a first approximation, empirically based Allee-effect reference points are consistent with suggested thresholds for overfishing and stock collapse. When evaluating Allee effects in marine fish, it is important not to conflate causal mechanism(s) with the pattern between r and abundance; the latter is of greater practical import. An additional caveat is that the longer a population remains at low abundance, the more likely it is that the environment around it will change in ways that are unfavourable to recovery. It might be this “temporal tyranny” of small population size that is most likely to produce an emergent Allee effect and depensatory dynamics in some collapsed marine fish populations.