Ocean scale hypoxia‐based habitat compression of Atlantic istiophorid billfishes
By E. Prince, Jiangang Luo, C. Goodyear, J. Hoolihan, D. Snodgrass, Eric S. Orbesen, Joseph E. Serafy, M. Ortiz, M. Schirripa. 2010
157 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) below near-surface optimums in the eastern tropical seas are among the largest contiguous areas of naturally occurring hypoxia in the world oceans, and are predicted to expand and shoal with global warming. In the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP), the surface mixed layer is defined by a shallow thermocline above a barrier of cold hypoxic water, where dissolved oxygen levels are ≤3.5 mL L−1. This thermocline (∼25–50 m) constitutes a lower hypoxic habitat boundary for high oxygen demand tropical pelagic billfish and tunas (i.e., habitat compression). To evaluate similar oceanographic conditions found in the eastern tropical Atlantic (ETA), we compared vertical habitat use of 32 sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus) and 47 blue marlin (Makaira nigricans) monitored with pop-up satellite archival tags in the ETA and western North Atlantic (WNA). Both species spent significantly greater proportions of their time in near-surface waters when inside the ETA than when in the WNA. We contend that the near-surface density of billfish and tunas increases as a consequence of the ETA OMZ, therefore increasing their vulnerability to overexploitation by surface gears. Because the ETA OMZ encompasses nearly all Atlantic equatorial waters, the potential impacts of overexploitation are a concern. Considering the obvious differences in catchability inside and outside the compression zones, it seems essential to standardize these catch rates separately to minimize inaccuracies in stock assessments for these species. This is especially true in light of global warming, which will likely exacerbate future compression impacts.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7b5cfe1fd16e795fb1acfdc7635eacc6e21444b
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In Global and Planetary Change
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Citations in the corpus
- Projected impacts of climate change on marine fish and fisheries (2013, background): “Eastern boundary current conditions off the west coast of Africa create an oxygen minimum zone that is much closer to the surface than in the western tropical Atlantic.”
- Comparative ecology of widely distributed pelagic fish species in the North Atlantic: Implications for modelling climate and fisheries impacts (2014, background): “In the eastern Atlantic, levels of dissolved oxygen are the primary factor limiting the dive depths, a factor that likely increases the susceptibility of blue marlin to bycatch in surface fishing gear in these regions (Prince et al., 2010).”
- Man and the Last Great Wilderness: Human Impact on the Deep Sea (2011, background): “Billfish in the tropical Pacific [254] and Atlantic [255] experience this compression; they are larger as prey become more concentrated, but they are also much more susceptible to fishing mortality.”
- Global habitat preferences of commercially valuable tuna (2015, background): “The mixed layer depth can limit the vertical distribution of tuna and tuna like species (Bernal et al., 2009; Prince et al., 2010), while the sea surface height anomaly (SSH) provides information on the open-ocean physical habitat of pelagic species.”