March 4, 2022 — The Slope Sea off the Northeast United States is a major spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), a new paper affirms. This finding likely has important implications for population dynamics and the survival of this fish, according to the paper, “Support for the Slope Sea as a major spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna: evidence from larval abundance, growth rates, and particle-tracking simulations,” published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

“Overall, our results provide important supporting evidence that the Slope Sea is a major spawning ground that is likely to be important for population dynamics,” the paper states. Spawning in the Slope Sea “may offer the species additional resilience in the face of both harvesting and climate change,” the paper adds.

The paper presents larval evidence supporting the recognition of the Slope Sea as a major spawning ground, including that larvae collected in the Slope Sea grew at the same rate as larvae collected in the Gulf of Mexico, indicating that this region is good larval habitat.

“In comparison to everything else we know about this species, the Slope Sea is a perfectly good place to be born as a larva,” said lead author Christina Hernández, who was a doctoral student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering at the time of the study.

Read the full story at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution