Populations of seals, sea lions, and sea otters have sequentially collapsed over large areas of the northern North Pacific Ocean and southern Bering Sea during the last several decades. A bottom-up nutritional limitation mechanism induced by physical oceanographic change or competition with fisheries was long thought to be largely responsible for these declines. The current weight of evidence is more consistent with top-down forcing. Increased predation by killer whales probably drove the sea otter collapse and may have been responsible for the earlier pinniped declines as well. We propose that decimation of the great whales by postWorld War II industrial whaling caused the great whales' foremost natural predators, killer whales, to begin feeding more intensively on the smaller marine mammals, thus ''fishing-down'' this element of the marine food web. The timing of these events, information on the abundance, diet, and foraging behavior of both predators and prey, and feasibility analyses based on demographic and energetic modeling are all consistent with this hypothesis.T he abrupt decline of the western stock of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus) h across most of the northern North Pacific Ocean and southern Bering Sea is one of the world's most well known yet poorly understood marine conservation problems. For years, scientists attributed this decline to nutritional limitation, the presumed consequence of a climate regime shift and͞or competition with regional fisheries (1). Although fisheries and regime shifts undoubtedly influenced both the fishes and their associated food webs (2-5), several recent reviews of the available information on sea lions and their environment, including an assessment by the National Research Council, cast doubt on the nutritional limitation hypothesis (6, 7), notwithstanding evidence from field and laboratory studies that diet quality is a factor in sea lion energetics (8). The doubt stems from three main findings. First, most measures of behavior, physiology, and morphology from surviving adult sea lions and pups in the western Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian Islands are inconsistent with nutritional limitation. These animals have better body condition, reduced foraging effort, and reduced field metabolic rates relative to similar measures from the increasing sea lion population in southeast Alaska (7). Second, sea lion prey is abundant in most areas of the decline (9). Known changes in prey availability and other features of the oceanic ecosystem are particularly incongruous with the most precipitous phase of the decline, which occurred during the mid-to late 1980s, and can be accounted for only by greatly increased adult mortality (6). Third, populations of piscivorous sea birds, many of which feed on earlier life stages of the same fish species consumed by sea lions, have remained stable or increased in the same area and over the same period that the sea lions have declined (10). Top-down forcing now appears to have been an important contributor to declines of Steller sea lion...

The concept of a highly productive habitat, or Green Belt, along the edge of the continental shelf in the Bering Sea is based upon compelling but fragmentary and often anecdotal observations of a variety of physical and biological features acquired from many sources over many years. Enhanced production at continental margins is not a novel concept, but in the case of the Bering Sea its importance has been overlooked during studies of the unusually broad continental shelf. The limited data reported from the vicinity of the shelf edge in the Bering Sea indicate that annual primary production can be as high as 175 to 275 g C m˜ year‐, or approximately 60% greater than production in the adjacent outer shelf domain and 270% greater than in the oceanic domain. Estimates of annual secondary production at the eastern shelf edge also average approximately 60% higher than estimates for the outer domain and 260% higher than those for the oceanic domain. Physical processes at the shelf edge, such as intensive tidal mixing and transverse circulation and eddies in the Bering Slope Current, bring nutrients into the euphoric zone and contribute to enhanced primary and secondary production and elevated biomass of phytoplankton and zooplankton. Fishes and squids concentrate in this narrow corridor because of favourable feeding conditions and because of a thermal refuge from cold shelf‐bottom temperatures that can be found at the shelf edge from fall to spring. The abundance of zooplankton, fishes and squids, in turn, attracts large numbers of marine birds and mammals. In aggregate, the observations suggest that sustained primary productivity, intense food web exchange and high transfer efficiency at the shelf edge are important to biomass yield at numerous trophic levels and to ecosystem production of the Bering Sea.