| Summary: | 308 páginas The bluemouth, Helicolenus dactylopterus (Delaroche 1809) is a marine demersal fish that is widely distributed in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The bluemouth is mostly considered a deep-sea species, but it has a wide bathymetric range of distribution (from 62 m to 1135 m depth). Precisely because of this distribution, it is caught in many fisheries that exploit marine organisms on the continental shelf and the deep-sea. Since the late nineties, the biology of the bluemouth has been studied in the NE and NW Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the North Sea, focusing mainly in the distribution, age, growth and reproduction of the species. However, as with other deep-sea species, there are still many gaps in what regards the biology, ecology and population dynamics of this species. As it is now widely recognized, information on a species’ population structure is of primary importance in developing an optimal strategy for its efficient management (Coyle, 1998). Thus, the overall goal of this study was to provide baseline information on the population structure of bluemouth, Helicolenus dactylopterus, around the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, this thesis provides the first comparative study of bluemouth populations in the Northeast Atlantic and the Mediterranean. To characterize the population structure of bluemouth in terms of growth and stock components, a morphological approach was followed, because the analysis of morphological characters (i. e., meristic and morphometric characters) has proved useful for characterizing populations of a variety of marine fish (Swain et al., 2005). To achieve this, bluemouth from 9 areas were sampled. In the NE Atlantic, specimens were caught off Galicia, the Cantabrian Sea, the Gulf of Cadiz, Portugal and the Porcupine Bank (Irish continental margin). Specimens from the Mediterranean were sampled in the Alboran Sea, off-shore Alicante (south-west of the Balearic Sea), the Catalonian coast and in Italian waters (Sicily). The samples from the Porcupine Bank and ...
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