Project: Nutritional ecology of climate change: Impacts on Northwest Atlantic fishes

NSF Award Abstract:

Warming oceans are changing the distributions of fish populations worldwide. However, observed shifts in distribution differ from one species to the next, which lead to changes in the marine community and the biological interactions. Altered predator-prey relationships could force a switch in diet, which might influence growth and affect a fish’s ability to persist in the environment. This project aims to predict how fish behaviors contribute to responses of species, populations, and ecosystems to continued environmental change. The study is focused on the distribution and diets of fishes in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, one of the most rapidly warming marine systems on the planet. An existing long-term data set (1973 – present) forms the basis for a retrospective analysis of how fish populations and their diets have changed over the past five decades. The model developed from these data is testing how observed changes in distribution and diet are related to species-specific behaviors and movements. This information is incorporated into predictions of the nature and quality of fish diets in the year 2055 using different climate projections. The broader impacts are focused on broadening participation in STEM careers, which includes training of students and a post-doc. To advance the recruitment and education of future scientists, project results are being integrated into the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s LabVenture program, which serves 10,000 elementary students in Maine annually. In parallel, the project is partnering with the Seacoast Science Center in New Hampshire to develop and test educational modules. Research findings are being communicated to fisheries managers locally and nationally and are contributing to science-based resource management.

Increased water temperatures impact the energetics of individual organisms directly by increasing metabolism and indirectly by altering overlap with prey as a result of taxon-specific shifts in population distributions. Species-specific shifts in spatial distributions and diets could mediate or exacerbate the metabolic consequences of warming waters. Furthermore, food web structure, and any temporal shifts in its composition, could affect ecosystem stability. Behavioral flexibility in diet and space use could confer resilience of individual species to climate change, but empirical evidence is lacking. This project combines spatial statistics, multivariate analyses, and food web models to understand how warming waters impact individuals, species interactions, and community stability, as well as identify taxon-specific behaviors that could confer resilience. This project is conducting retrospective analyses to quantify both decadal-scale shifts in fish distributions and diet, and species-level flexibility in diet and movements. From these analyses, spatially explicit predator-prey interactions are being projected into the future (2055) using three climate change scenarios to predict novel interactions and changes in diet for important predatory fishes. Linkages between behavior and resilience to warming waters are being tested by comparing the energetic consequences of diet shifts between behaviorally flexible and inflexible species. Quantifying interaction strengths among food web components is providing insight into how flexibility of individual taxa affects broader food web structure and how community stability is maintained.

This project is jointly funded by the Biological Oceanography Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.