Larval supply, settlement, and recruitment of American lobster, Homarus americanus

Burdett-Coutts, Victoria H. M. (Victoria Hariot Maria) (2010) Larval supply, settlement, and recruitment of American lobster, Homarus americanus. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

This thesis contains three studies on the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Two took place in Bonne Bay, Newfoundland and a third used a long-term young-of-year (YoY) recruitment index from New England, USA. In the first study, planktonic larval and benthic suction sampling along the Bonne Bay estuary indicated larval concentrations were consistently highest at the mouth of the bay, with a more dramatic drop in density from early to late stages than reported elsewhere. The second study evaluated the spatial scale of correlations between YoY recruitment and older juvenile densities at some 70 sampling sites in New England. Strong correlations at even the finest scale (metre's), along with behavioural experiments, suggest postlarvae preferentially settle among resident conspecifics. The third study compared fishers' local knowledge of lobster hatching and nursery locations in Bonne Bay against ground-truth data collected by fishery-dependent and -independent surveys. Fishers accurately identified hatching but not nursery locations in the bay. -- Keywords: Homarus americanus; larvae; advection; juvenile; recruitment; mortality; Local Environmental Knowledge.

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