CLUPEOID LIFE-HISTORY STYLES IN VARIABLE ENVIRONMENTS

Marine fish species with planktonic larval stages experience high and variable pre-adult mortality, and in accordance with general life-history theory have evolved iteroparity to reduce the uncertainty in reproductive success of individuals. In this paper we use a Monte Carlo model to explore the influence of spawning style and adult survival of clupeoids on the spawning success of individual fish during their life span, when early stage survival is determined according to different spectra of environmental variability. In these simulations the variation in reproductive success was governed first by the number of batches of eggs spawned by each adult fish over its lifespan (as determined by its pattern of spawning and the adult survival rate), and secondly by the patterning of environmental variability affecting early stage survival. We consider that the life history styles of the clupeoids are based on co-evolved traits in which the different patterns of iteroparity represent different solutions for coping with the variable nature of early-stage survival. When these life history traits are compared on time scales appropriate to each species, they are therefore unlikely to provide the correlation between brood strength variation and the life span of adults proposed in Murphy's (1968) contribution to this aspect of life history theory. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.