Recruitment

A measure of the number of fish that survive to a particular life stage, often used to predict future population size. Some examples include the number of offspring that survive the larval stage and reach the juvenile stage (larval recruitment), the number of individuals that survive (i.e., recruit) to the next year (e.g., age two recruits), the number of fish that reach sexual maturity (i.e., recruit to the spawning population), or in the case of a fishery, the number of fish that recruit to the catchable component of the population.