Understanding the processes that drive reproductive success in marine fish stocks is critical to effective fisheries management. These processes can be difficult to investigate, especially in age-structured populations, because they occur at transgenerational scales. Reproductive success is often attributed to a small portion of the adult population (<0.01%) and thought to be driven primarily by random external factors, consistent with the concept of sweepstake reproductive success (SRS). A competing concept, the reproductive resilience paradigm, posits that fishes have evolved complex spawner-recruit systems to achieve lifetime reproductive success and maintain population stability within highly variable environments. Here, we examine these two concepts. First, we analyse the popular sport fish red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus, Sciaenidae), drawing on genetic and reproductive data to estimate a plausible range for the ratio of effective population size (