Elephant seals as ecosystem sentinels for the northeast Pacific Ocean twilight zone

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Beltran, Roxanne S.; Payne, Allison R.; Kilpatrick, A. Marm; Hale, Conner M.; Reed, Madison; Hazen, Elliott L.; Bograd, Steven J.; Jouma'a, Joffrey; Robinson, Patrick W.; Houle, Emma; Matern, Wade; Sabah, Alea; Lewis, Kathryn; Sebandal, Samantha; Coughlin, Allison; Heredia, Natalia Valdes; Penny, Francesca; Dalrymple, Sophie Rose; Penny, Heather; Sherrier, Meghan; Peterson, Ben; Reiter, Joanne; Le Boeuf, Burney J.; Costa, Daniel P.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Cruz; National Oceanic Atmospheric Admin (NOAA) - USA; University of California System; University of California Santa Cruz
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-13388
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adp2244
• 发表日期: 2025-02-14
• 页码: 764-769
• 关键词: climate-change impacts; population-dynamics; oscillation; RESOURCES; fitness; decades; whales; fish

摘要

The open ocean twilight zone holds most of the global fish biomass but is poorly understood owing to difficulties of measuring subsurface ecosystem processes at scale. We demonstrate that a wide-ranging carnivore-the northern elephant seal-can serve as an ecosystem sentinel for the twilight zone. We link ocean basin-scale foraging success with oceanographic indices to estimate twilight zone fish abundance five decades into the past, and into the future. We discovered that a small variation in maternal foraging success amplified into larger changes in offspring body mass and enormous variation in first-year survival and recruitment. Worsening oceanographic conditions could shift predator population trajectories from current growth to sharp declines. As ocean integrators, wide-ranging predators could reveal impacts of future anthropogenic change on open ocean ecosystems.