The Case of the ‘Missing’ Arctic Bivalves and The Walrus: The Biggest [Overlooked] Clam Fishery on the Planet

A 15-year time-series of data on benthic community response to rapid climate change at a biomass “hotspot” in the northern Bering Sea, Alaska, provides an exceptional opportunity to evaluate naturally occurring molluscan dead-shell assemblages as ecological archives. We find that, at five middle-shelf stations censused annually from 2000-2014, dead-shell assemblages collected in 2014 are dominated by obligate deposit-feeding Nuculanidae bivalves as opposed to the other families in that guild or the facultative deposit-feeding Tellinidae that dominate the most recent living bivalve assemblages. Live-dead contrast is significant where the bivalve biomass and abundance has declined over time, and muted where bivalve abundances, and therefore shell input, increased, underscoring the general danger of assuming constant shell input. We also find that proportional abundance-based measures are best suited for detecting benthic response to climate change, rather than the presence-absence and rank-abundance metrics. Combined with preliminary results from shell age-dating, these results indicate that dead-shell assemblages provide a short-lived but compositionally faithful ecological memory well-suited for detecting recent site- and habitat-level ecological change under cold-water conditions. With marine regime change suspected to now be underway throughout the Arctic, molluscan dead-shell assemblages should become an integral part of efforts to detect transitioning regions.

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Arctic bivalve dead-shell assemblages as high temporal- and spatial- resolution archives of ecological regime change in response to climate change

Meadows

Grebmeier

Kidwell

2023

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Oyster Shell Production and Loss in the Chesapeake Bay

Mann

Southworth

Wesson

et al. 2022

Journal of Shellfish Research

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Ice algae contributions to the benthos during a time of sea ice change: a review of supply, coupling, and fate

Niemi,

Bluhm,

Juul-Pedersen

et al. 2024

Front. Environ. Sci.

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The polymer-facilitated flux of ice algae on Arctic shelves can initiate benthic activity and growth after the nutritionally constrained winter period. Lipid-rich ice algae are readily consumed by benthos and those entering the sediment can benefit deposit feeders. Ice algae assimilated by benthic organisms cascade up multiple trophic levels within the benthic sub-web, re-entering the pelagic sub web through habitat coupling species. Pelagic predators can have significant ice-algal carbon signals obtained from the benthic compartment. Sympagic-pelagic-benthic coupling on Arctic shelves is expected to weaken with ongoing sea-ice change. This review discusses the phenology, quantity, and quality of ice-algal contributions to coupling, linked to thinning snow and ice cover including multi-year ice replacement. Predicting future coupling between marine sub-webs requires focused research that considers trophic markers of multiple carbon sources.

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The Case of the ‘Missing’ Arctic Bivalves and The Walrus: The Biggest [Overlooked] Clam Fishery on the Planet

Cited by 3 publications

References 117 publications

Arctic bivalve dead-shell assemblages as high temporal- and spatial- resolution archives of ecological regime change in response to climate change

Arctic bivalve dead-shell assemblages as high temporal- and spatial- resolution archives of ecological regime change in response to climate change

Oyster Shell Production and Loss in the Chesapeake Bay

Ice algae contributions to the benthos during a time of sea ice change: a review of supply, coupling, and fate

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