The response of marine predators to global climate change and shifting ocean conditions is tightly linked with their environment and prey. Environmental data are frequently used as proxies for prey availability in marine predator distribution models, as the ephemeral nature of prey makes sampling difficult. For this reason, the functional, ecological links between environment, prey, and predator are rarely described or explicitly tested. We used 3 years of vessel-based whale survey data paired with oceanographic sampling and hydroacoustic backscatter to model trophic relationships between water column structure, krill availability, and blue whale Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda distribution in New Zealand’s South Taranaki Bight region under typical (2014 and 2017) and warm (2016) austral summer oceanographic regimes. The warm regime was characterized by a shallower mixed layer, and a stronger, thicker, and warmer thermocline. Boosted regression tree models showed that krill metrics predicted blue whale distribution (typical regime = 36% versus warm regime = 64% cross-validated deviance explained) better than oceanography (typical regime = 19% versus warm regime = 31% cross-validated deviance explained). However, oceanographic features that predicted more krill aggregations (typical regime) and higher krill density (warm regime) aligned closely with the features that predicted higher probability of blue whale presence in each regime. Therefore, this study confirms that environmental drivers of prey availability can serve as suitable proxies for blue whale distribution. Considering changing ocean conditions that may influence the distribution of marine predators, these findings emphasize the need for models based on functional relationships, and calibrated across a broad range of conditions, to inform effective conservation management.

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The distribution of marine zooplankton depends on both ocean currents and swimming behavior. Many zooplankton perform diel vertical migration (DVM) between the surface and subsurface, which can have different current regimes. If concentration mechanisms, such as fronts or eddies, are present in the subsurface, they may impact zooplankton near-surface distributions when they migrate to near-surface waters. A subsurface, retentive eddy within Palmer Deep Canyon (PDC), a submarine canyon along the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), retains diurnal vertically migrating zooplankton in previous model simulations. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the presence of the PDC and its associated subsurface eddy increases the availability and delivery of simulated Antarctic krill to nearby penguin foraging regions with model simulations over a single austral summer. We found that the availability and delivery rates of simulated krill to penguin foraging areas adjacent to PDC were greater when the PDC was present compared to when PDC was absent, and when DVM was deepest. These results suggest that the eddy has potential to enhance krill availability to upper trophic level predators and suggests that retention may play a significant role in resource availability for predators in other similar systems along the WAP and in other systems with sustained subsurface eddies.