Fronts and eddies as key structures in the habitat of marine fish larvae: opportunity, adaptive response and competitive advantage

By A. Bakun. 2006

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Surface fronts and mesoscale eddies are two classes of ocean structures that engender significant pattern in the habitats of marine organisms. Both are sites where mechanical energy of the physical system may be accessible for augmenting trophic energy available to biological organisms. Accordingly, they may offer opportunities for exceptional local productivity and growth of species particularly adapted to excelling in such highly-productive rapid-growth/high-mortality situations. The major relevant physical mechanisms involved are presented. A widespread attraction of many types of fish to floating objects drifting in the ocean is cited as an apparent adaptive response to the desirable aspects of surface fronts. An apparent contrary tendency for certain important marine fish species to be particularly successful in relatively poorly productive situations, where slower growth may be offset by much lower early life predation mortality, is also noted. Competing tradeoffs between (1) early life nutrition and resulting growth, and (2) mortality of early stages due to predation are suggested. These tradeoffs are posed and illustrated via a “predator pit” conceptual framework. Illustrations of the evident reproductive habitat choices of several populations of large temperate tunas are briefly presented. It is concluded that the time may have come for a general shift in the approach of at-sea fish larval ecological investigations from the conventional focus on associations with environmental properties on a “macro” scale to intensive investigations of the real-time progressions of linked physical-biological interactions occurring on a “meso” (and smaller) scale.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52c14a833f682cb8a6cbde8c7fa65fd6d0ca3446

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Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary and ecological constraints of fish spawning habitats (2015, background): “Several studies have in fact demonstrated that fish spawning distribution is tightly linked to the local and contemporary environment at relatively small scales (e.g. Bailey et al., 2005; Bakun, 2006; Ciannelli et al., 2010).”
Sub-surface hotspots in shallow seas: fine-scale limited locations of top predator foraging habitat indicated by tidal mixing and sub-surface chlorophyll (2010, background): “…found to be important in determining top predator distributions at much larger spatial (~100 km) and temporal scales (Genin 2004, Yen et al. 2004, Bakun 2006, Ballance et al. 2006), and may help to explain why others have found an absence of scale dependence for dolphin habitat (Redfern et al.…”
Oceanographic habitat, growth and mortality of larval anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) in the northern Aegean Sea (eastern Mediterranean) (2007, background): “Anticyclonic gyres are retention areas for zooplankton (including ichthyoplankton, Bakun 2006 ) and this was evident for anchovy larvae in this study, at least for the low-egg production/low larval mortality year of 1995.”
Factors Preventing the Recovery of a Historically Overexploited Shellfish Species, Ostrea lurida Carpenter 1864 (2009, background): “…about the factors that hold remnant populations at low levels in the absence of direct exploitation, including poor per capita reproduction at low population size (depensation or Allee effects; Myers et al. 1995), predator pits (Bakun 2006), and alternative community states (Choi et al. 2004).”