Cusk (Brosme brosme) and climate change: assessing the threat to a candidate marine fish species under the US Endangered Species Act

Abstract

Hare, J.A., Manderson, J.P., Nye, J.A., Alexander, M.A., Auster, P.J., Borggaard, D.L., Capotondi, A.M., Damon-Randall, K.B., Heupel, E., Mateo, I., O'Brien, L., Richardson, D.E., Stock, C.A., and Biege, S.T. 2012. Cusk (Brosme brosme) and climate change: assessing the threat to a candidate marine fish species under the US Endangered Species Act. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 69: 1753–1768. In the Northwest Atlantic Ocean cusk (Brosme brosme) has declined dramatically, primarily as a result of fishing activities. These declines have led to concern about its status, which has prompted reviews under the US Endangered Species Act and the Canadian Species at Risk Act. Changes in distribution and abundance of a number of marine fish in the Northwest Atlantic have been linked to climate variability and change, suggesting that both fishing and climate may affect the status of cusk. Our goal was to evaluate potential effects of climate change on Northwest Atlantic cusk distribution. Coupling a species niche model with the output from an ensemble of climate models, we projected cusk distribution in the future. Our results indicate cusk habitat in the region will shrink and fragment, which is a result of a spatial mismatch between high complexity seafloor habitat and suitable temperature. The importance of habitat patch connectivity for cusk is poorly understood, so the population-level consequences of climate-related habitat fragmentation are uncertain. More broadly, climate change may reduce appropriate thermal habitat and increase habitat fragmentation for other cold-water species in the region; thereby, increasing the potential for regional overexploitation and extirpation.

Native fish community structure and Indo-Pacific lionfish Pterois volitans densities along a depth-temperature gradient in Onslow Bay, North Carolina, USA

“…Under this latter hypothesis, the distributions ob served in the spring/summer reflect the pattern of bottom temperature experienced the winter before. The question of depth or bottom temperature regulation of fish distribution is important (Hare et al 2012a), and continued research in Onslow Bay could evaluate which factor is most important. As Onslow Bay continues to warm, if temperature is more important, warmer-water species should move into shallower water.…”

“…We examined both summer and winter bottom temperature to evaluate the importance of maximum and minimum temperatures. Baseline community data combined with concomitant collection of key environmental variables are necessary to establish causality between the environment and community change (Parmesan & Yohe 2003) and for the development of predictive tools to examine the consequences of change (Cheung et al 2012, Hare et al 2012a, Wuenschel et al 2012. To establish the biological baseline, we surveyed the fish community of larger mobile species along with smaller-bodied cryptic fishes that appear to show increased sensitivity to changes in temperature (Perry et al 2005).…”

Projecting Marine Mammal Distribution in a Changing Climate

“…As a result of these limitations, confidence in predicting the magnitude and direction of climate change trends that are capable of altering marine resource distributions is generally greatest at ocean-basin spatial scales and multi-decadal to century timescales. In the absence of refined resolution via downscaling or high-resolution global models (see below), regional inferences must focus on the magnitude and direction of changes due to large-scale greenhouse gas accumulation, and include the caveat that unresolved regional responses may significantly modify these trends (e.g., Hare et al, 2012;Lynch et al, 2015).…”

Emerging Adaptation Approaches for Climate-Ready Fisheries Management

“…Scientifically, there has been an increasing focus on what is called climate "downscaling, " or the translation of relatively coarseresolution global climate model outputs to finer-resolution projections for a particular location (Stock et al, 2011). There are substantial scientific challenges to downscaling, particularly in nearshore waters, and current approaches range from coarse, first-order projections that can readily be developed from existing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-class models (Hare et al, 2012) to dynamic oceanographic models that can project changes in upwelling, primary productivity, alkalinity, and other factors (Hermann et al, 2013). Making such projections more easily available could spark a wide range of uses, much as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Change Web Portal (http://www.…”

“…The simplest approaches use expert judgment to identify the species most likely to be vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change or most in need of further study, building from first principles and natural history (Chin et al, 2010). More complex bioclimatic envelope models project population distribution from statistical relationships (Hare et al, 2012), while more advanced models include mechanistic dynamics for populations and ecosystems (Hare et al, 2010;Kaplan et al, 2010;Barange et al, 2014).…”