Fluctuation scaling in L\'evy-stable recruitment of marine fishes in randomly varying environments

Abstract

This paper studies the scaling properties of recruitment fluctuations in randomly varying environments, for abundant marine species with extreme reproductive behavior. Fisheries stock-recruitment data from the North Atlantic display fluctuation scaling, a proportionality between the standard deviation and the average recruitment among stocks. The proportionality covers over five orders of magnitude in the range studied. A linear-scaling behavior can be a sign of a universal distribution of the normalized data across stocks. In light of this conjecture, it is demonstrated that the L\'evy-stable model offers a better effective description of the recruitment distribution than the log-normal model. Care is devoted to the problem of random sums of random variables. Recruitment is calculated by summing random offspring numbers with infinite variance, where the number of summands (i.e. spawning population size) is also a random process with infinite variance.