RESEARCH ARTICLE Regime Shift in an Exploited Fish Community Related to Natural Climate Oscillations
Identifying the various drivers of marine ecosystem regime shifts and disentangling their re-spective influence are critical tasks for understanding biodiversity dynamics and properly managing exploited living resources such as marine fish communities. Unfortunately, the mechanisms and forcing facto...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1000.2596 http://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00273/38466/36886.pdf |
| Summary: | Identifying the various drivers of marine ecosystem regime shifts and disentangling their re-spective influence are critical tasks for understanding biodiversity dynamics and properly managing exploited living resources such as marine fish communities. Unfortunately, the mechanisms and forcing factors underlying regime shifts in marine fish communities are still largely unknown although climate forcing and anthropogenic pressures such as fishing have been suggested as key determinants. Based on a 24-year-long time-series of scientif-ic surveys monitoring 55 fish and cephalopods species, we report here a rapid and persis-tent structural change in the exploited fish community of the eastern English Channel from strong to moderate dominance of small-bodied forage fish species with low temperature preferendum that occurred in the mid-1990s. This shift was related to a concomitant warm-ing of the North Atlantic Ocean as attested by a switch of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscilla-tion from a cold to a warm phase. Interestingly, observed changes in the fish community structure were opposite to those classically induced by exploitation as larger fish species of higher trophic level increased in abundance. Despite not playing a direct role in the regime shift, fishing still appeared as a forcing factor affecting community structure. Moreover, al-though related to climate, the regime shift may have been facilitated by strong historic ex-ploitation that certainly primed the system by favoring the large dominance of small-bodied fish species that are particularly sensitive to climatic variations. These results emphasize that particular attention should be paid to multidecadal natural climate variability and its in-teractions with both fishing and climate warming when aiming at sustainable exploitation and ecosystem conservation. |
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