Report of the Working Group on Fish Ecology

This report details the work undertaken during the third meeting of the ICES Working Group on Fish Ecology (WGFE). The work areas undertaken addressed the following issues: Eco-logical Quality Objectives (EcoQOs) for fish communities (Section 2), fish habitat (Section 3), summarising important fish and fisheries data sets for the North sea and of potential interest to the REGNS project (Section 4), estimates of maximum gear-specific effort levels that North sea elasmobranchs that can be exerted without exceeding the sustainable mortality rates (sec-tion 5), the relative catchability of fishes in different survey gears (Section 6), abundance-range size relationships (Section 7), examination of the decline criteria used by conservation agencies (Section 8), further studies on the prey composition, food rations and gastric evacua-tion of North Sea fishes (Section 9), reviewing the feeding ecology of fish in the North sea and adjacent waters (Section 10), initiating broadscale studies of southern and western surveys (Section 11) and reviewing the updated IBTS manual with reference to the quality assurance for fish identification (Section 12).