A review of the battle for food in the Barents Sea: cod vs. marine mammals
By B. Bogstad, H. Gjøsæter, Tore Haug, U. Lindstrøm. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2015
90 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cod, harp seal and minke whale are the main top predators in the Barents Sea ecosystem. In the last decade, the abundance of cod has increased considerably, and is at a record high level. In spite of this, the growth and condition of cod has remained rather stable, although some decrease is seen in size at age of large, mature cod. During the same period, the abundance of harp seals has declined whereas the minke whale stock has been at a stable level. The body condition (blubber thickness) of these two mammal stocks has, however, decreased, with the strongest decrease observed for harp seals. A possible hypothesis for explaining this is that cod outperform the marine mammal stocks in the competition for food. The main advantages for cod are most likely larger availability of food (mainly capelin) during winter-spring than for marine mammals, as well as a wider range of prey species being available to cod than to marine mammals. Harp seals are more dependent on prey items found close to the ice edge than the other two predator stocks are, which could partly explain why the performance of harp seals is worse than that of the two other main top predators in the area.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6c436f467e47bd6cfdb0c6084da05d7e216d693
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecology
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Modelling climate change impacts on marine fish populations: process-based integration of ocean warming, acidification and other environmental drivers (2016, background): “…level processes: predation, competition, mutualism & facilitation 240 Direct environmental effects on fish are influenced by species interactions in the food web, 241 and can lead to indirect effects on other species (e.g. Link et al., 2009, Engelhard et al., 242 2014, Bogstad et al., 2015).”