Synchrony of recruitment across the North Atlantic: an update. (Or, “now you see it, now you don't!”)

About 20 years ago, Garrod and Colebrook, and Templeman, proposed that recruitment of marine fish in the North Atlantic was controlled by environmental factors that extended across the ocean basin. As evidence, they reported synchronous and lagged correlations in recruitment to stocks on opposite sides of the North Atlantic. We have updated the recruitment series and find no evidence of synchronous or lagged correlation on a basin scale in the last 20 years of data. The original evidence for basin scale correlations may have been a result of near-simultaneous decline in spawning stock biomass for many populations after 1950.