RECRUITMENT IN FLATFISH - LINES FOR FUTURE-RESEARCH

Understanding of any generalities and principles in fisheries science comes only after substantial efforts to collate and compare available information. This second flatfish symposium was formulated around the concept of falsifying testable hypotheses, although the results were m arginal at best, and progress toward any novel insights was elusive. I have a history of posing the question, Why? I attempted to answer thi s by pointing out some of the information voids necessary to the integ ration of organismal physiology and behaviours, appropriate scale envi ronmental variabilities, and the lack of our ability, or opportunity, to measure any of these processes on sufficient numbers of species to gain those insights. Second, I wonder why the continued statistical ef forts to manipulate great masses of fuzzy fisheries catch and sampling data, particularly when the action in life histories of fishes takes place at the local scale, upon individuals, in a very nearly binary fa shion, rather than over a somehow unified distribution that would be r equired in order to apply, appropriately, mean and variance or regress ion procedures. That there has to be a stock-recruitment relation is n ot logical. That plaice appear to have one implies two things: that th ere is a real bottle-neck in their adult habitat, and/or, that the sto ck/recruitment data are themselves misleading artifacts. I remain conv inced that the answers lie in better understanding of predator-prey re lations, and much better understanding of physiologically significant environmental variabilities, rather than in more sophisticated mathema tical processing of inadequate, and indirect inferences. Flatfish are proving themselves to be fish, with a twist. That is encouraging, but not enlightening.