Long‐term shifts in abundance and distribution of a temperate fish fauna: a response to climate change and fishing practices

By W. White, D. Gledhill, A. Hobday, Rebecca Brown, G. Edgar, G. Pecl. 2011

471 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aim South-eastern Australia is a climate change hotspot with well-documented recent changes in its physical marine environment. The impact on and temporal responses of the biota to change are less well understood, but appear to be due to influences of climate,as well as the non-climate related past and continuing human impacts. We attempt to resolve the agents of change by examining major temporal and distributional shifts in the fish fauna and making a tentative attribution of causal factors. Location Temperate seas of south-eastern Australia. Methods Mixed data sources synthesized from published accounts, scientific surveys, spearfishing and angling competitions, commercial catches and underwater photographic records, from the ‘late 1800s’ to the ‘present’, were examined to determine shifts in coastal fish distributions. Results Forty-five species,representing 27 families (about 30% of the inshore fish families occurring in the region), exhibited major distributional shifts thought to be climate related. These are distributed across the following categories: species previously rare or unlisted (12), with expanded ranges (23) and/or abundance increases (30), expanded populations in south-eastern Tasmania (16) and extralimital vagrants (4).Another 9 species, representing 7 families, experienced longerterm changes (since the 1800s) probably due to anthropogenic factors, such as habitat alteration and fishing pressure: species now extinct locally (3), recovering (3), threatened (2) or with remnant populations (1). One species is a temporary resident periodically recruited from New Zealand. Of fishes exhibiting an obvious poleward movement, most are reef dwellers from three Australian biogeographic categories: widespread southern, western warm temperate (Flindersian) or eastern warm temperate (Peronian) species. Main conclusions Some of the region’s largest predatory reef fishes have become extinct in Tasmanian seas since the‘late 1800s’,most likely as a result of poorfishing practices. In more recent times, there have been major changes in the distribution patterns of Tasmanian fishes that correspond to dramatic warming observed in the local marine environment.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/001a0a076624523876d2988be340ae60610a66fa

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Citations in the corpus

Fish conservation in freshwater and marine realms: status, threats and management (2016, background): “In Australia, Reef Plan (2013) aims to reduce damage from land-based agricultural practices on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), essentially managing land use in catchments to reduce the input of sediment and nutrients into waters of the GBR.”
Impacts of climate change in a global hotspot for temperate marine biodiversity and ocean warming (2011, background): “Southward (poleward) range extensions have been documented for 45 species of fish on the south-east coast (Last et al., 2011).”
Defining and observing stages of climate-mediated range shifts in marine systems (2014, background): “Indeed, many species are found throughout the year in what were traditional summer habitats as winters become increasingly mild (Bellard et al., 2012; Last et al., 2011).”
A statistical framework to explore ontogenetic growth variation among individuals and populations: a marine fish example (2015, result): “…responses is consistent with previous studies of the effects of warming on southeast Australian coastal fish species (Thresher et al. 2007, Last et al. 2011, Neuheimer et al. 2011) and theoretical expectations of a direct temperature effect on the physiology and ecology of poikilotherms…”
Potential movement of fish and shellfish stocks from the sub-Arctic to the Arctic Ocean (2013, background): “, 2012), (ii) improving understanding of how climate change will impact shifts in the distributions of fish species (Perry et al., 2005; Dulvy et al., 2008; Mueter and Litzow, 2008; Nye et al., 2009; Last et al., 2011), and (iii) developing models to predict the effects of climate change on future d”
Patterns of landscape and assemblage structure along a latitudinal gradient in ocean climate (2012, background): “This is particularly pertinent as shifts in the distributional ranges of several species are occurring in most oceans of the globe as a result of global change (e.g. Southward et al. 1995, Last et al. 2011, Philippart et al. 2011, Wernberg et al. 2012).”
Climate-change induced tropicalisation of marine communities in Western Australia (2012, background): “In Australia, 45 marine species off the southeastern coast (around Tasmania) were found to display major shifts in distribution from the late 1800s to the present, which may be linked to climate change (Pitt et al. 2010; Last et al. 2011).”
Detecting range shifts among Australian fishes in response to climate change (2011, methodology): “Probably the most compelling and comprehensive example of demonstrated climate-induced range shifts of fishes in Australia was recently reported in Last et al. (2011). This study monitored Tasmanian coastal fish distributions and included data since the late 1800s using multiple methods (e.”
Snapper (Chrysophrys auratus): a review of life history and key vulnerabilities in New Zealand (2014, background): “More recent mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analyses of P. major (from Asia) and P. auratus (from Australia), however, showed that they are closely-related sister species (Tabata & Taniguchi 2000; Chiba et al. 2009) and not in a monophyletic grouping with Pagrus, which is restricted to the Mediterranean S”