Fisheries-induced evolution and sexual dimorphism in North Sea plaice

Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies, Wageningen University, IJmuiden, The Netherlands

Fabian Mollet

Fabian Mollet

Selective exploitation of fish is increasingly recognized to drive evolution of life history traits and tools have been developed to detect changes in single traits. Eco-genetic individual based models are a powerful tool to study possible outcomes of evolution with multiple traits. However, in most applications the sexes are assumed to be equal whereas in fish they are often dimorphic at least in size. We will develop a case specific eco-genetic individual based model for North Sea plaice incorporating the sexual size dimorphism to study the evolution of plaice over the last century and in particular the different responses in males and females. In a first step we have to calibrate the model for males and females such that the model predictions match the observations. We then assume that differences in growth, onset of reproduction and reproductive investment between males and females arise from different mortality regimes that plaice males and females experience in particular during reproduction. We then use the model to test this hypothesis and to find a mechanistic explanation for different sex specific evolutionary responses.



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Last edited: 25 March 2016

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