Consistent Unimodal Body Length Distributions in Hundreds of Reef Fishes Across Diverse Life Histories

Abstract

Animal body size distributions result from interactions of growth, mortality and recruitment. In ecology and fisheries science, theoretical models of fish body size distributions are widely used but rely on life‐history parameters—growth coefficient (K) and natural mortality rate (M)—that remain unknown for most species and are challenging to estimate. Analysing data from underwater visual surveys and exhaustive sampling, representing 3068 populations across 797 species of shallow‐water, mostly unfished marine fishes, we demonstrate that post‐recruitment body length distributions exhibit a consistent unimodal shape across species and populations. When scaled to the mean body length, these distributions are strikingly similar across all teleost and elasmobranch species, with diverse life histories and maximum body sizes ranging from 1 cm to 3 m. Observed size structure can be approximated by a truncated normal distribution with a coefficient of variation of ~0.34 (SE = 0.002). Such consistent observed body size distributions could be aligned with Beverton–Holt population dynamics theory, if assuming an M/K ratio of ~1.5 and logistic observational selectivity with 50% detectability at ~40% of maximum body length. Alternatively, observed distributions could reflect deviations from theoretical expectations, and reconciling the unimodal distributions with theory may require relaxing some model assumptions, such as continuous recruitment, constant density‐independent growth or constant natural mortality. Overall, the consistency of population‐ and species‐level body length distributions means that unfished size structure could be predicted from a single body size parameter. It also suggests evolutionary convergence of diverse growth and mortality processes towards a narrow range of viable outcomes.