Fisheries shocks provide an opportunity to reveal multiple recruitment sources of sardine in the Sea of Japan

Abstract

The abrupt decline in sardine catches in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea (SJ-ECS) in 2014 and 2019 and the recovery in the following years call into question the current assumption that sardines in the SJ-ECS form a self-recruiting subpopulation. To test this hypothesis, we analysed otolith stable oxygen and carbon isotope profiles (δ¹⁸O, δ¹³C) of age-0 and age-1 sardines from 2010 and 2013-2015 year-classes captured in the SJ-ECS, as geographic markers for nursery areas. Age-0 sardines generally showed a significant ontogenetic decrease in otolith δ¹⁸O from larval to juvenile stages. However, the majority of age-1 captured in spring 2011, 2015 and 2016 showed non-decreasing otolith δ¹⁸O profiles, suggesting that the age-0 off the Japanese coast were not the main source of recruitment. Different migration groups were thus indicated: the “locals” growing up off the Japanese coast and the migrating “nonlocals”. The isotope profiles of the “nonlocals” overlapped with those of age-0 captured in the subarctic North Pacific, suggesting that they may be migrants from the Pacific, or perhaps an unobserved northward migration group in the SJ-ECS. Our results highlight the considerable uncertainty in the population structure assumed in current stock assessment models for Japanese sardine.