Environmental and climate variability drive population size of annual penaeid shrimp in a large lagoonal estuary

Abstract

Species with short life spans frequently show a close relationship between population abundance and environmental variation making these organisms potential indicator species of climatic variability. White (Penaeus setiferus), brown (P. aztecus), and pink (P. duorarum) penaeid shrimp typically have an annual life history and are of enormous ecological, cultural, and economic value to the southeastern United States and Gulf of Mexico. Within North Carolina, all three species rely on the Pamlico Sound, a large estuarine system that straddles Cape Hatteras, one of the most significant climate and biogeographic breaks in the world, as a nursery area. These characteristics make penaeid species within the Pamlico Sound a critical species-habitat complex for assessing climate impacts on fisheries. However, a comprehensive analysis of the influence of the environmental conditions that influence penaeid shrimp populations has been lacking in North Carolina. In this study, we used more than 30 years of data from two fishery-independent trawl surveys in the Pamlico Sound to examine the spatial distribution and abundance of adult brown, white, and pink shrimp and the environmental drivers associated with adult shrimp abundance and juvenile brown shrimp recruitment using numerical models. Brown shrimp recruitment models demonstrate that years with higher temperature, salinity, offshore windstress, and North Atlantic Oscillation phase predict increased abundance of juveniles. Additionally, models predicting adult brown, white, and pink shrimp abundance illustrate the importance of winter temperatures, windstress, salinity, the North Atlantic Oscillation index, and the abundance of spawning adult populations from the previous year on shrimp abundance. Our findings show a high degree of variability in shrimp abundance is explained by climate and environmental variation and indicate the importance of understanding these relationships in order to predict the impact of climate variability within ecosystems and develop climate-based adaptive management strategies for marine populations.

Density distribution of Penaeus merguensis De Man, 1888 based on habitat in the waters of Merauke District, South Papua Province, Indonesia

“…Duggan et al (2019) explained that unlike in places with no freshwater inflow (high salinity), the density of prawns increases. Salinity is a factor that determines the abundance, survival, recruitment, osmotic pressure, and distribution of penaeid prawns in waters (Torres et al 2020;Yang et al 2020;Minello 2017;Jiang et al 2021;Plagányi et al 2021;Rahi et al 2021;Amalia et al 2022;Azwar et al 2023;Schlenker et al 2023).…”

Cross-scale environmental impacts across persistent and dynamic aggregations within a complex population: implications for fisheries management

“…EBFM is widely viewed as a set of tools for successful management in different contexts (Trochta et al 2018) and constitutes a fundamental component of sustainability and balance between environmental, social, and economic objectives (Marshall et al 2018). Current stock assessment frameworks often do not include key features such as ecosystem components and ecological complexity of popu-lations, although it has already been shown that environmental and climatic variation are closely associated with the abundance variation of commercially important species (e.g., Schlenker et al 2023). However, the ongoing development of next-generation stock assessments highly prioritizes the incorporation of missing critical information (Punt et al 2020).…”