Linking Life History Theory, Environmental Setting, and Individual-Based Modeling to Compare Responses of Different Fish Species to Environmental Change

We link life history theory, environmental setting, and individual-based modeling to compare the responses of two fish species to environmental change, Life history theory provides the framework for selecting representative species, and in combination with information on important environmental characteristics, it provides the framework for predicting the results of model simulations. Individual-based modeling offers a promising tool for integrating and extrapolating our mechanistic understanding of reproduction, growth, and mortality at the individual level to population-level responses such as size-frequency distributions and indices of year-class strength. Based on the trade-offs between life history characteristics of striped bass Morone saxatilis and smallmouth bass Micropterus dolomieu and differences in their respective environments, we predicted that young-of-year smallmouth bass are likely to demonstrate a greater compensatory change in growth and mortality than young-of-year striped bass in response to changes in density of early life stages and turnover rates of zooplankton prey. We tested this prediction with a simulation experiment. The pattern of model results was consistent with our expectations: By the end of the first growing season, compensatory changes in length and abundance of juveniles were more pronounced for smallmouth bass than for striped bass. The results also highlighted the dependence of model predictions on the interplay between density of larvae and juveniles and characteristics of their zooplankton prey.