Dr. Guoqi Han
Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre
Shrimp Modelling
The objective of this project is to investigate the potential drift and inter-dependence among fishing areas using a regional ocean circulation model in which we apply a suite of early life history models to evaluate the degree of retention, exchange, and dispersal within and among shrimp fishing areas.
DFO separates shrimp off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador into fishing areas in an attempt to take differences in regional productivity in the development of conservation and management measures. However, these animals live in a current flowing from north to south and little is known about the extent of their drift and the inter-relationship between spawning and larval survival in one area of concentrations with production in another.
The life history models utilize different combinations of temperature and food dependent development rates, diurnal and ontogenetic vertical migration schemes determined from a review of the existing literature, and mortality rates. Using such particle-tracking models, we determined what life history models yield realistic levels of recruitment within and among stocks, and investigated the degree of interannual variation using the circulation model’s reconstruction of historical ocean currents in the region.
-
The operational framework for hindcast-forecast planktonic dispersal patterns on Labrador-northern Grand Banks is ongoing.
-
Development of advisory documents on management strategies for physically connected inter-dependent stocks in a changing environment, with a broader application for other species is in progress.
-
Ocean Circulation Model is completed.
-
The review of development rates and migratory behaviour of larval shrimp is completed.
-
A hierarchical conceptual model of the diurnal and ontogenetic migration patterns is completed.
-
Preliminary assessment of life history models including temperature and food dependent development components were performed.
-
Investigating the importance of release location and time of year, larval life history, and wind regimes on Atlantic populations of northern shrimp was accomplished.
-
Various connectivity metrics to use in the analysis of larval dispersal experiments were identified, developed and applied in our analysis.
-
Defining regional variations in surface temperature, ice and chlorophyll concentrations by using satellite imagery is ongoing.
-
Performing hierarchical experiments to assess the role of environmental variability on interannual variations in drift, dispersal and survival potential is in progress.
