Whales as marine ecosystem engineers

By J. Roman, J. Estes, Lyne Morissette, C. Smith, Daniel P. Costa, J. McCarthy, J. Nation, S. Nicol, A. Pershing, V. Smetacek. 2014

425 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Baleen and sperm whales, known collectively as the great whales, include the largest animals in the history of life on Earth. With high metabolic demands and large populations, whales probably had a strong influence on marine ecosystems before the advent of industrial whaling: as consumers of fish and invertebrates; as prey to other large-bodied predators; as reservoirs of and vertical and horizontal vectors for nutrients; and as detrital sources of energy and habitat in the deep sea. The decline in great whale numbers, estimated to be at least 66% and perhaps as high as 90%, has likely altered the structure and function of the oceans, but recovery is possible and in many cases is already underway. Future changes in the structure and function of the world's oceans can be expected with the restoration of great whale populations.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b01d012770325bb5cc3c9b8d60d586adae7ba98f

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Citations in the corpus

Whale killers: Prevalence and ecological implications of killer whale predation on humpback whale calves off Western Australia (2015, background): “Research on killer whales only really began after many large whale populations had already been pushed to the brink of extinction by the 1960s and early 1970s (Baird 2002, Roman et al. 2014).”
Marine mammal conservation: over the horizon (2021, background): “Their typically large body sizes and broad range of diets influence community structure and functioning through processes such as top-down control, nutrient recycling and bioturbation (Estes & Duggins 1995, Bowen 1997, Roman et al. 2014, Kiszka et al. 2015, Albouy et al. 2017).”
Consequences of global shipping traffic for marine giants (2018, background): “They traverse large areas of the world’s oceans, and their migratory routes intersect numerous marine roads (Roman et al. 2014).”
Estimating body mass of free‐living whales using aerial photogrammetry and 3D volumetrics (2019, background): “Due to their large size, baleen whales serve an important role in marine ecosystems, including the transfer of nutrients from high productive high-latitude feeding areas to low-latitude nutrient-poor breeding areas, and facilitates sequestration of carbon to deep sea habitats (Roman et al., 2014).”
Behavioural drivers of the ecological roles and importance of marine mammals (2015, background): “…mediated indirect interactions · BMII · Nutrient transport · Behavioural facilitation Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher Mar Ecol Prog Ser 523: 267–281, 2015268 abundances and high metabolic rates (Katona & Whitehead 1988, Bowen 1997, Roman et al. 2014).”
Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean (2015, background): “J.-B. Raina et al., DMSP biosynthesis by an animal and its role in coral thermal stress response.”