Biological Impacts of the 2013–2015 Warm-Water Anomaly in the Northeast Pacific: Winners, Losers, and the Future

By L. Cavole, Alyssa M. Demko, Rachel E. Diner, A. Giddings, I. Koester, Camille Pagniello, M. Paulsen, A. Ramírez-Valdez, S. Schwenck, Nicole K. Yen and 2 more. 2016

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Author(s): Cavole, LM; Demko, AM; Diner, RE; Giddings, A; Koester, I; Pagniello, CMLS; Paulsen, ML; Ramirez-Valdez, A; Schwenck, SM; Yen, NK; Zill, ME; Franks, PJS | Abstract: © 2016 by The Oceanography Society. All rights reserved. A large patch of anomalously warm water (nicknamed “the Blob”) appeared off the coast of Alaska in the winter of 2013–2014 and subsequently stretched south to Baja California. This northeastern Pacific warm-water anomaly persisted through the end of 2015. Scientists and the public alike noted widespread changes in the biological structure and composition of both openocean and coastal ecosystems. Changes included geographical shifts of species such as tropical copepods, pelagic red crabs, and tuna; closures of commercially important fisheries; and mass strandings of marine mammals and seabirds. The ecological responses to these physical changes have been sparsely quantified and are largely unknown. Here, we provide a bottom-up summary of some of the biological changes observed in and around the areas affected by the Blob.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/878b627809d64178fb2005a2b54ff2883bee5af1

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Citations in the corpus

Predicting cetacean abundance and distribution in a changing climate (2018, background): “…physical and biological properties resulted in overall changes in eco‐ system structure, with notable responses documented for inverte‐ brates, fish, seabirds and marine mammal species (Bond et al., 2015; Cavole et al., 2016; Laake, Lowry, DeLong, Melin, & Carretta, 2018; Leising et al., 2015).”
Marine top predators as climate and ecosystem sentinels (2019, background): “…et al. 2016) may have been the first indication of ecosystem effects from a marine heatwave developing in the northeastern Pacific Ocean (Cavole et al. 2016; Jacox et al. 2018); as prey became increasingly scarce, weaning juvenile sea lions were unable to find food, resulting in high…”