Bulk Carbon and Amino Acid nitrogen isotope data from Baltic cod (Gadus morhua) and European flounder (Platichthys flesus) muscle tissue samples from the western and central Baltic Sea ...

Eutrophication, increased temperatures and stratification can lead to massive, filamentous, N2-fixing cyanobacterial (FNC) blooms in coastal ecosystems with largely unresolved consequences for the mass and energy supply in pelagic and benthic food webs. Mesozooplankton adapt to not top-down controll...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Steinkopf, Markus, Krumme, Uwe, Schulz-Bull, Detlef, Wodarg, Dirk, Loick-Wilde, Natalie
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2023
Subjects:
Cod
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.12jm63z48
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.12jm63z48
Description
Summary:Eutrophication, increased temperatures and stratification can lead to massive, filamentous, N2-fixing cyanobacterial (FNC) blooms in coastal ecosystems with largely unresolved consequences for the mass and energy supply in pelagic and benthic food webs. Mesozooplankton adapt to not top-down controlled FNC blooms by switching diets from phytoplankton to microzooplankton, resulting in a directly quantifiable increase in its trophic position (TP) from 2.0 (herbivore) to as high as 3.0 (carnivore). If this process in mesozooplankton, we call trophic lengthening, was transferred up to higher trophic levels of a food web, a large loss of energy could result in massive declines of fish biomass. We used compound-specific nitrogen stable isotope data of amino acids (CSIA) to estimate and compare the nitrogen (N) sources and TPs of cod and flounder (mesopredators) from areas with influence of FNC blooms (central Baltic Sea) and without it (western Baltic Sea). We tested if FNC-caused trophic lengthening in ... : The fishes were collected during four cruises to the western Baltic Sea (ICES subdivision (SD) 22) and central Baltic Sea (SD 24-25) in January/February 2019 and 2020 and caught by bottom trawl, with a Bacoma cod end (2019) and a TV30 #520 trawl gear (2020) following the standards of the Baltic International Trawl Survey (ICES, 2017). On board, the fish were killed, identified to species level, counted, and measured. The otoliths were extracted and a sample of white muscle tissue was taken from behind the third dorsal fin of 30 cod individuals and from the tail muscle of 21 flounder individuals. All samples were frozen immediately at −20°C for later stable isotope analyses. The frozen cod und flounder muscle tissue samples were cleaned mechanically and with distilled water to remove surface contaminants, freeze dried (Christ Alpha 1-4), and then ground and homogenized for further processing. For CSIA, ~10 mg of each dried sample was transferred into a heat-resistant borosilicate vial, mixed with 5 ml of 6M ...