Modelling and simulations of the migration of pelagic fish

Abstract

Abstract Barbaro, A., Einarsson, B., Birnir, B., Sigurðsson, S., Valdimarsson, H., Pálsson, Ó. K., Sveinbjörnsson, S., and Sigurðsson, Þ. 2009. Modelling and simulations of the migration of pelagic fish. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 826–838. We applied an interacting particle model to the Icelandic capelin stock to reproduce the spawning migration route for three different years, successfully predicting the route for 2008. Using available temperature data and approximated currents, and without using artificial forcing terms or a homing instinct, our model was able to reproduce the observed migration routes from all 3 years. By a sensitivity analysis, we identified oceanic temperature and the balance between the influence of interaction among particles and the particles' response to temperature as the control parameters most significant in determining the migration route. One significant contribution of this paper is the inclusion of orders of magnitude more particles than similar models, which affects the global behaviour of the model by propagating information about surrounding temperature through the school more efficiently. To maintain the same dynamics between different simulations, we argue a linear relationship between the time-step, radii of interactions, and the spatial resolution, and we argue that these scale as N−1/2, where N is the number of particles.