Influence of fecundity on recruitment variability of marine fish

It has often been contended that the strong variability of recruitment in marine fish populations is a consequence of their large fecundities. To test this proposal, a simple linear relationship is derived linking the standard deviation of log-recruitment for a species to its log-fecundity, and a specific prediction of the slope coefficient is provided. This result is tested using all available data for major marine fish stocks. We found that the derived relationship approximately predicts the ratio of recruitment variability to log-fecundity for the centroid of the cluster of data points, but the scatter about the centroid is so great that no significant relationship exists between recruitment variability and log-fecundity.