Linking air-sea energy exchanges and European anchovy potential spawning ground

The physical and chemical processes of the sea greatly affect the reproductive biology of fishes, mainly influencing both the numbers of spawned eggs and the survivorship of early stages up to the recruitment period. In the central Mediterranean, the European anchovy constitutes one of the most important fishery resource. Because of its short living nature and of its recruitment variability, associated to high environmental variability, this small pelagic species undergo high interannual fluctuation in the biomass levels. Despite several efforts were addressed to characterize fishes spawning habitat from the oceanographic point of view, very few studies analyze the air-sea exchanges effects. To characterize the spawning habitat of these resources a specific technique (quotient rule analysis) was applied on air-sea heat fluxes, wind stress, sea surface temperature and turbulence data, collected in three oceanographic surveys during the summer period of 2004, 2005 and 2006. The results showed the existence of preferred values in the examined physical variables, associated to anchovy spawning areas. Namely, for heat fluxes the values were around -40 W/m2, for wind stress 0.04-0.11 N/m2, for SST 23 oC, and 300 - 500 m3s-3 for wind mixing. Despite the obtained results are preliminary, this is the first relevant analysis on the air-sea exchanges and their relationship with the fish biology of pelagic species.