An international study led by the Centre for Geometric Biology has found that larger fish are much more important to feeding the planet than previously thought.
The research confirmed what field biologists have long suggested: that larger mothers reproduced disproportionately much more than smaller ones. Furthermore, larger mothers may produce offspring that perform better and are more likely to survive to adulthood.
The findings clash with current theories. And the results have major implications for fisheries, the value placed on marine protected areas, the impacts of climate change and the 20% of people globally who rely on fish for protein.
The Centre’s Diego Barneche, Craig White, and Dustin Marshall, with Ross Robertson from The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, collated and analysed data from 342 species of fish across 14 orders gathered from studies undertaken over a 100-year time span. The team were particularly interested in understanding the relationships between female size and the number of eggs produced, egg volume and egg energy content.
Most life-history theories assume that reproductive output increases proportionately with female size; for every unit increase in female size, there is a proportional increase in reproductive output. That is, the combined reproductive output of two one-kilogram fish is assumed to be the same as a single two-kilogram fish. But for the overwhelming majority of species, the research team found that overall reproductive output increased disproportionately with female body size. Bigger is much, much better.
The consequences for fisheries cannot be understated. Reproductive output drives population replenishment, and larger fish are much more important for the replenishment of marine fish populations than previously assumed. Outdated models for sustainable harvesting of fish populations are fundamentally flawed.
Our models of how organisms grow and reproduce are based on the wrong assumptions, and as a consequence we are overharvesting wild populations with calamitous consequences.Dustin Marshall
The costs of global change make the study findings even more stark. Climate change is predicted to cause fish body sizes to decrease. Warmer oceans will likely have fewer (and smaller) fish, and drastically reproductive output.
But the research also points to some good news, suggesting that current conservation strategies are more potent than previously thought. Marine protected areas have been shown to increase fish size by 28% on average. That means that the per-capita reproductive output of fish inside these areas will be much higher than is generally appreciated.
Our discovery means that the benefits of marine protected areas have been massively underestimated, they produce far more new fish than unprotected areas of the same size.Dustin Marshall
This research is published in the Journal Science.
Centre for Geometric Biology 
