Potential sources of bias in the climate sensitivities of fish otolith biochronologies

Abstract

Analysis of growth increments in the hard parts of animals (e.g., fish otoliths) can be used to assess how organisms respond to variability in environmental conditions. In this study, mixed-effects models were applied to otolith data simulated for two hypothetical fish populations with assumed biological parameters and known growth response to environmental variability. Our objective was to assess the sensitivity of environment-growth relationships derived from otolith biochronologies when challenged with a range of realistic ageing errors and sampling regimes. We found that the development of a robust biochronology and the precision of environmental effect estimates can be seriously hampere..