Reply to Baudron et al.: Fishing matters: Age-specific deepening is driven by exploitation

In their response to our paper “Exploitation drives an ontogenetic-like deepening in marine fish” (1), Baudron et al. (2) unfairly characterize our result as an alternative explanation. Throughout our paper, and in the closing remark, we explicitly state that additional factors must be considered: “Ontogenetic factors, fisheries exploitation, and climate variability must be considered before deepening or any other spatial adjustment of populations/assemblages can be attributed to any of these mechanisms.” Recent research on a wide variety of species supports this contention (3⇓–5). Baudron et al. (2) claim that we attribute 72% of the observed deepening to size-selective fishing and that we question “whether ontogenetic deepening is a real … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: kenneth.frank{at}dfo-mpo.gc.ca. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1