Fisheries typically truncate target species' size distributions through an increase in mortality, especially if harvest is size-selective. Such truncation can push a harvested species' size distribution into classes most vulnerable to gape-limited predation, such that predator-prey dynamics might affect the rate of recovery from fishing. Understanding this rate of recovery is crucial to adaptive management of no-take reserves and fisheries closures. We used a 2-species size-structured model to examine how gape-limited predation alters post-harvest recovery for 3 example prey species, viz. cod, haddock, and whiting. We found little difference in recovery patterns of prey abundance and size structure between systems with gape-limited generalist predation and those with no size-dependent predation. However, gape-limited obligate predation can lead to fluctuations, with transient declines, that delay recovery to the pre-harvest equilibrium for both biomass and mean size due to a time lag in predator recovery. Fluctuating recovery dynamics under obligate predation were most likely for predators that experienced greater declines due to prey loss during harvest and for slow-growing prey with an adult size refuge. We conclude that through these delays, the presence of a strong dynamically linked predator can alter the expec - tations of the time scale for different recovery metrics used in adaptive management.

The first signs of sea star wasting disease (SSWD) epidemic occurred in just few months in 2013 along the entire North American Pacific coast. Disease dynamics did not manifest as the typical travelling wave of reaction-diffusion epidemiological model, suggesting that other environmental factors might have played some role. To help explore how external factors might trigger disease, we built a coupled oceanographic-epidemiological model and contrasted three hypotheses on the influence of temperature on disease transmission and pathogenicity. Models that linked mortality to sea surface temperature gave patterns more consistent with observed data on sea star wasting disease, which suggests that environmental stress could explain why some marine diseases seem to spread so fast and have region-wide impacts on host populations.