At the dawn of Arabian fisheries: Fishing activities of the inhabitants of the Neolithic tripartite house of Marawah Island, Abu Dhabi Emirate (United Arab Emirates)

International audienceThis paper presents the results of a study of nearly 8000 fish bones from MR11 Area A, a Neolithic stone build house located on Marawah Island, United Arab Emirates. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the site was inhabited from the first half of the 6 th to the mid-5 th millennium BC, making it one of the oldest Neolithic occupation sites in the whole of the Arabian Gulf. Initial excavations between 2003-4 revealed a single room and then more recent excavations in 2016-17 uncovered two adjacent structures which proved to be a tripartite house. Examination of the fish remains from this particular site allows both a spatial and diachronic analysis. Archaeo-ichthyological studies can determine the role of fisheries within the subsistence strategies of past societies and the fishing techniques they adopted. This study provides important evidence regarding coastal and island lifestyle during the Neolithic. It outlines the predominance of small coastal fish such as grunts, emperors, and seabreams in the faunal assemblage. It thus suggests that fishing was essentially carried out in the surrounding shallow waters where softbottoms and seagrass meadows predominate. Non-selective fishing techniques probably involved the use of small-mesh devices such as beach seines and coastal barrier traps

Is the timing of spawning in sparid fishes a response to sea temperature regimes?

Published spawning seasons of sparid fish were investigated to determine if there were consistent patterns that could be related to large-scale physical variability, and whether these relationships were species-specific or characteristic of higher taxonomic groupings. For individual species, genera and the family Sparidae as a whole, there was a consistent pattern; spawning at lower latitudes was concentrated close to the month of lowest sea surface temperature, while spawning at higher latitudes was more variable with greater deviations from the month of minimum sea surface temperature. The distribution of sparids may be limited by a lack of tolerance of one or more early life-history stage to high water temperatures, so targeting spawning to the coolest part of the year could be a tactic allowing maximum penetration into warmer waters. Such a link between the physiology of early life-history stages and timing of spawning could have direct consequences for patterns of distributions over a number of taxonomic scales. If there are similar constraints on the reproduction of other species, even minor increases in water temperature due to global warming that may be within the tolerance of adults, may impose constraints on the timing of spawning, with flow-on effects for both species and whole ecosystems