My undergrad research on young cod rested on a rule most fish ecologists take for granted: bigger juveniles survive better. For my third paper, I set out to test whether that rule actually holds across species.
Co-authored with Dr. Levi Newediuk. Published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 2026.
In my honours work, size kept coming up as the thing that decides which young fish make it. If that's true everywhere, size is a cheap, useful way to judge how a wild population is doing. If it isn't, a lot of thinking leans on a shaky assumption. Nobody had pulled the evidence together to check.
Set the rules for what counted as evidence before looking at any results.
Built searches to find every study that measured size and survival in young fish.
Read and filtered 829 studies down to the 10 that met the bar.
Went through each paper to build one dataset: 76 effect sizes covering 16,264 fish.
Designed the Bayesian models that combine results across very different studies.
Every calculation and every figure, from raw numbers to final plots.
Paired the analysis with a perspective on why bigger often isn't better. Published in CJFAS in 2026, with me as first and corresponding author.
Being bigger gave young fish only a small, uncertain survival edge.
Every study leaned slightly toward bigger fish surviving better, but only one showed a clear effect.
The 10 studies
All 10 studies lean toward bigger fish surviving better…
…but almost every one overlaps no difference.
In the paper I set out why bigger isn’t always better. Here are a few of the reasons.
In the paper: .