What is known about deep-sea fish population structure and breeding biology?
In this paper I revisit these questions, slightly modified to embrace a wider global scale, to assess how much our knowledge has advanced over the last decade. In this context the proceedings of several recent international meetings on deepwater fishes and/or fisheries are relevant. These were the 1996 Deepwater fishes symposium of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles (McIntyre and Thorpe 1996), the ICES 1998 Deepwater fish and fisheries theme session (Gordon 2001b) and the NAFO 2001 Deep-sea fisheries symposium (Moore and Gordon 2003). Deepwater fisheries are generally considered to be those that exploit fish or shellfish that habitually live at depths greater than 400 m. However, this is an arbitrary boundary since many species have ranges that extend from the continental shelf into deepwater. Others, such as the sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) of the northern Pacific, occupy the shelf as juveniles and the deepwater as adults. In the northeast Atlantic species such as ling (Molv
