Ecosystem response persists after a prolonged marine heatwave

Suryan, Robert M.; Arimitsu, Mayumi L.; Coletti, Heather A.; Hopcroft, Russell R.; Lindeberg, Mandy R.; Barbeaux, Steven J.; Batten, Sonia D.; Burt, William J.; Bishop, Mary Anne; Bodkin, James L.; Brenner, Richard E.; Campbell, Robert W.; Cushing, Daniel A.; Danielson, Seth L.; Dorn, Martin W.; Drummond, Brie A.; Esler, Daniel; Gelatt, Thomas S.; Hanselman, Dana H.; Hatch, Scott A.; Haught, Stormy; Holderied, Kris; Iken, Katrin; Irons, David B.; Kettle, Arthur B.; Kimmel, David G.; Konar, Brenda; Kuletz, Kathy J.; Laurel, Benjamin J.; Maniscalco, John M.; Matkin, Craig O.; McKinstry, Caitlin A. E.; Monson, Daniel H.; Moran, John R.; Olsen, Dan; Palsson, Wayne A.; Pegau, W. Scott; Piatt, John F.; Rogers, Lauren A.; Rojek, Nora A.; Schaefer, Anne; Spies, Ingrid; Straley, Janice M.; Strom, Suzanne L.; Sweeney, Kathryn L.; Szymkowiak, Marysia; Weitzman, Benjamin P.; Yasumiishi, Ellen M.; Zador, Stephani G.

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-83818-5

Cited by 161 publications

(148 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…Marine mammals and other taxa have methods of compensating for noise (Parks et al, 2009;Tennessen and Parks, 2016;Fournet et al, 2018a;Matthews et al, 2020) but the effectiveness of compensatory behavior and the ultimate effects of noise on reproductive success are unknown. In marine protected areas and elsewhere, underwater noise is just one of many stressors that affect marine wildlife (Hatch et al, 2012;Williams et al, 2015;Blair et al, 2016;Haver et al, 2019), for example, the recent catastrophic effects of changing climate and unpredictable conditions on Alaska's marine ecosystems (Oliver et al, 2018;von Biela et al, 2019;Piatt et al, 2020;Arimitsu et al, 2021;Suryan et al, 2021). As maritime activities gradually resume in Glacier Bay and other areas, and marine protected area managers must rise to the challenge to use what has been learned in the pandemic-induced quiet to improve methods to mitigate vessel noise and foster healthy marine ecosystems in these vulnerable and important public resources.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underwater Sound Levels in Glacier Bay During Reduced Vessel Traffic Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Gabriele¹,

Ponirakis

Klinck

2021

Front. Mar. Sci.

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The global COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp decline in vessel traffic in many areas around the world, including vessel-based tourism throughout Alaska, USA in 2020. Marine vessel traffic has long been known to affect the underwater acoustic environment with direct and indirect effects on marine ecological processes. Glacier Bay National Park in southeastern Alaska has monitored underwater sound since 2000. We used continuous, calibrated hydrophone recordings to examine 2020 ambient sound levels compared with previous years: 2018, the most recent year with data available, and 2016 for historical perspective. Park tourism occurs mainly in May–September. Overall, the number of vessel entries in Glacier Bay was 44–49% lower in 2020 (2020: n = 1,831; 2018: n = 3,599; 2016: n = 3,212) affecting all vessel classes, including the complete absence of cruise ships and only three tour vessel trips. In all years, we found clear seasonal and diurnal patterns in vessel generated noise, focused from 06:00 to 20:00 local time (LT) in the summer months. Broadband (17.8–8,910 Hz) sound levels in the 2020 Visitor Season were 2.7 dB lower than 2018 and 2.5 dB lower than 2016. Focusing on morning (06:00–09:00 LT) and afternoon (15:00–18:00 LT) time-blocks when tour vessels and cruise ships enter and exit Glacier Bay, median broadband sound levels were 3.3–5.1 dB lower in 2020 than prior years. At the 95th percentile levels, morning and afternoon peak times in 2020 were 6.3–9.0 dB quieter than previous years. A 3 dB decline in median sound level in the 125 Hz one-third octave band in 2020 reflects a change in medium and large vessel noise energy and/or harbor seal vocalizations. Our results suggest that all types of vessels had a role in the quieter underwater sound environment in 2020, with the combined acoustic footprint of tour vessels and cruise ships most evident in the decrease in the 95th percentile loudest sounds. This and other descriptions of the pandemic-induced quiet, and the gradual return to increased activity, can help inform efforts to improve existing methods to mitigate vessel noise impacts and maintain the ecological integrity of marine protected areas.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underwater Sound Levels in Glacier Bay During Reduced Vessel Traffic Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Gabriele¹,

Ponirakis

Klinck

2021

Front. Mar. Sci.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The extreme MHW impacted marine organisms at multiple trophic levels (Barbeaux et al, 2020; Brodeur et al, 2019; Daly et al, 2017; Peterson et al, 2017; Santora et al, 2020), and a growing body of evidence indicates an abrupt ecosystem‐wide response occurred over the large spatial extent (Suryan et al, 2021; Walsh et al, 2018). Large‐scale mortality events by marine predators and pelagic food web specialists were among the first visible indicators of a major ecosystem perturbation in the GOA during the MHW (Piatt et al, 2020; Savage, 2017) and suggested a major disruption in energy transfer through the middle trophic level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heatwave‐induced synchrony within forage fish portfolio disrupts energy flow to top pelagic predators

Arimitsu

Piatt

Hatch³

et al. 2021

Global Change Biology

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During the Pacific marine heatwave of 2014–2016, abundance and quality of several key forage fish species in the Gulf of Alaska were simultaneously reduced throughout the system. Capelin (Mallotus catervarius), sand lance (Ammodytes personatus), and herring (Clupea pallasii) populations were at historically low levels, and within this community abrupt declines in portfolio effects identify trophic instability at the onset of the heatwave. Although compensatory changes in age structure, size, growth or energy content of forage fish were observed to varying degrees among all these forage fish, none were able to fully mitigate adverse impacts of the heatwave, which likely included both top‐down and bottom‐up forcing. Notably, changes to the demographic structure of forage fish suggested size‐selective removals typical of top‐down regulation. At the same time, changes in zooplankton communities may have driven bottom‐up regulation as copepod community structure shifted toward smaller, warm water species, and euphausiid biomass was reduced owing to the loss of cold‐water species. Mediated by these impacts on the forage fish community, an unprecedented disruption of the normal pelagic food web was signaled by higher trophic level disruptions during 2015–2016, when seabirds, marine mammals, and groundfish experienced shifts in distribution, mass mortalities, and reproductive failures. Unlike decadal‐scale variability underlying ecosystem regime shifts, the heatwave appeared to temporarily overwhelm the ability of the forage fish community to buffer against changes imposed by warm water anomalies, thereby eliminating any ecological advantages that may have accrued from having a suite of coexisting forage species with differing life‐history compensations.

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“…Between late 2013 and 2016, a marine heatwave occurred in the GOA that exceeded the magnitude and duration of any other heatwave on record in the region. This heatwave event led to temperature anomalies greater than 2.5 • C (Bond et al, 2015;Di Lorenzo and Mantua, 2016) and unprecedented shifts in the region's biological communities, including increases in harmful algal blooms, reductions in fishery recruitment, and mass mortality of marine mammals and seabirds (Leising et al, 2015;Piatt et al, 2020;Suryan et al, 2021). In the summer of 2019, the GOA was impacted by another marine heatwave, leading to similarly extreme temperature anomalies (Amaya et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Stress-Scape Framework to Evaluate Potential Effects of Multiple Environmental Stressors on Gulf of Alaska Juvenile Pacific Cod

et al. 2021

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Quantifying the spatial and temporal footprint of multiple environmental stressors on marine fisheries is imperative to understanding the effects of changing ocean conditions on living marine resources. Pacific Cod (Gadus macrocephalus), an important marine species in the Gulf of Alaska ecosystem, has declined dramatically in recent years, likely in response to extreme environmental variability in the Gulf of Alaska related to anomalous marine heatwave conditions in 2014–2016 and 2019. Here, we evaluate the effects of two potential environmental stressors, temperature variability and ocean acidification, on the growth of juvenile Pacific Cod in the Gulf of Alaska using a novel machine-learning framework called “stress-scapes,” which applies the fundamentals of dynamic seascape classification to both environmental and biological data. Stress-scapes apply a probabilistic self-organizing map (prSOM) machine learning algorithm and Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) analysis to produce distinct, dynamic patches of the ocean that share similar environmental variability and Pacific Cod growth characteristics, preserve the topology of the underlying data, and are robust to non-linear biological patterns. We then compare stress-scape output classes to Pacific Cod growth rates in the field using otolith increment analysis. Our work successfully resolved five dynamic stress-scapes in the coastal Gulf of Alaska ecosystem from 2010 to 2016. We utilized stress-scapes to compare conditions during the 2014–2016 marine heatwave to cooler years immediately prior and found that the stress-scapes captured distinct heatwave and non-heatwave classes, which highlighted high juvenile Pacific Cod growth and anomalous environmental conditions during heatwave conditions. Dominant stress-scapes underestimated juvenile Pacific Cod growth across all study years when compared to otolith-derived field growth rates, highlighting the potential for selective mortality or biological parameters currently missing in the stress-scape model as well as differences in potential growth predicted by the stress-scape and realized growth observed in the field. A sensitivity analysis of the stress-scape classification result shows that including growth rate data in stress-scape classification adjusts the training of the prSOM, enabling it to distinguish between regions where elevated sea surface temperature is negatively impacting growth rates. Classifications that rely solely on environmental data fail to distinguish these regions. With their incorporation of environmental and non-linear physiological variables across a wide spatio-temporal scale, stress-scapes show promise as an emerging methodology for evaluating the response of marine fisheries to changing ocean conditions in any dynamic marine system where sufficient data are available.

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Ecosystem response persists after a prolonged marine heatwave

Cited by 161 publications

References 92 publications

Underwater Sound Levels in Glacier Bay During Reduced Vessel Traffic Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Underwater Sound Levels in Glacier Bay During Reduced Vessel Traffic Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Heatwave‐induced synchrony within forage fish portfolio disrupts energy flow to top pelagic predators

A Dynamic Stress-Scape Framework to Evaluate Potential Effects of Multiple Environmental Stressors on Gulf of Alaska Juvenile Pacific Cod

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