Puffins reveal contrasting relationships between forage fish and ocean climate in the North Pacific

Sydeman, William J.; Piatt, John F.; Thompson, Sarah; García‐Reyes, Marisol; Hatch, Scott A.; Arimitsu, Mayumi L.; Slater, Leslie; Williams, Jeffrey C.; Rojek, Nora A.; Zador, Stephani G.; Renner, Heather M.

doi:10.1111/fog.12204

Cited by 42 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(82 reference statements)

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“…We have seen such effort undertaken in papers addressing broad ecological questions (Kartzinel et al., ; Willerslev et al., ), and in diet studies of marine predators, where population consumption has significant fisheries management implications (Ford et al., ; Thomas et al., ). This approach should also be possible in monitoring programmes, such as those carried out on seabird diet (Jarman et al., ; Sydeman et al., ), where the long‐term investment warrants the development of robust DNA‐based methods that provide the best possible data.…”

Section: A View Of the Way Forward In Interpreting Sequence Countsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting with DNA in metabarcoding studies: How should we convert sequence reads to dietary data?

et al. 2018

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Advances in DNA sequencing technology have revolutionized the field of molecular analysis of trophic interactions, and it is now possible to recover counts of food DNA sequences from a wide range of dietary samples. But what do these counts mean? To obtain an accurate estimate of a consumer's diet should we work strictly with data sets summarizing frequency of occurrence of different food taxa, or is it possible to use relative number of sequences? Both approaches are applied to obtain semi-quantitative diet summaries, but occurrence data are often promoted as a more conservative and reliable option due to taxa-specific biases in recovery of sequences. We explore representative dietary metabarcoding data sets and point out that diet summaries based on occurrence data often overestimate the importance of food consumed in small quantities (potentially including low-level contaminants) and are sensitive to the count threshold used to define an occurrence. Our simulations indicate that using relative read abundance (RRA) information often provides a more accurate view of population-level diet even with moderate recovery biases incorporated; however, RRA summaries are sensitive to recovery biases impacting common diet taxa. Both approaches are more accurate when the mean number of food taxa in samples is small. The ideas presented here highlight the need to consider all sources of bias and to justify the methods used to interpret count data in dietary metabarcoding studies. We encourage researchers to continue addressing methodological challenges and acknowledge unanswered questions to help spur future investigations in this rapidly developing area of research.

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Section: A View Of the Way Forward In Interpreting Sequence Countsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting with DNA in metabarcoding studies: How should we convert sequence reads to dietary data?

et al. 2018

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“…Shifts in forage fish availability in the GOA were apparent in marine bird diet starting in 2014 [108], with a sharp decline in capelin and an increase in sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria), combined with a slow rebound of sand lance. In GOA waters, sand lance began a long steady decline in the early 2000s, to a low in 2011, and remained low to 2015 [67,109]. Capelin stocks were depressed after the 1976 regime shift [110], rebounded dramatically in 2007 as the GOA entered a new cold phase [67,109], and collapsed again during the heatwave in 2014-2016 [67,100].…”

Section: Causal Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016

et al. 2020

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About 62,000 dead or dying common murres (Uria aalge), the trophically dominant fish-eating seabird of the North Pacific, washed ashore between summer 2015 and spring 2016 on beaches from California to Alaska. Most birds were severely emaciated and, so far, no evidence for anything other than starvation was found to explain this mass mortality. Threequarters of murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the remainder along the West Coast. Studies show that only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore, and we estimate that total mortality approached 1 million birds. About two-thirds of murres killed were adults, a substantial blow to breeding populations. Additionally, 22 complete reproductive failures were observed at multiple colonies region-wide during (2015) and after (2016-2017) the mass mortality event. Die-offs and breeding failures occur sporadically in murres, but the magnitude, duration and spatial extent of this die-off, associated with multi-colony and multi-year reproductive failures, is unprecedented and astonishing. These events cooccurred with the most powerful marine heatwave on record that persisted through 2014-2016 and created an enormous volume of ocean water (the "Blob") from California to Alaska with temperatures that exceeded average by 2-3 standard deviations. Other studies PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226087 January 15, 2020 1 / 32 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Piatt JF, Parrish JK, Renner HM, Schoen SK, Jones TT, Arimitsu ML, et al. (2020) Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016. PLoS ONE 15(1):indicate that this prolonged heatwave reduced phytoplankton biomass and restructured zooplankton communities in favor of lower-calorie species, while it simultaneously increased metabolically driven food demands of ectothermic forage fish. In response, forage fish quality and quantity diminished. Similarly, large ectothermic groundfish were thought to have increased their demand for forage fish, resulting in greater top-predator demands for diminished forage fish resources. We hypothesize that these bottom-up and top-down forces created an "ectothermic vise" on forage species leading to their system-wide scarcity and resulting in mass mortality of murres and many other fish, bird and mammal species in the region during 2014-2017.

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“…In some marine ecosystems, seabirds have been put forth as reliable indicators of forage fish abundance and community structure (Cairns, ; Piatt, Sydeman, & Wiese, ; Sydeman et al., ,b). While most seabirds breed on land, they obtain virtually all their food from the sea.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We hypothesize that geographic variability in coastal pelagic food webs, as proxied by seabird diets, may be explained by physical and biological habitat characteristics across the region, from the Gulf of Alaska (GoA) to the western Aleutian Islands. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed a large data set of tufted puffin ( Fratercula cirrhata ) diet samples (for details on the database see Sydeman et al., ). Briefly, puffins forage 50–100 km from their breeding colonies and deliver fresh, intact, and easily identifiable forage fish to chicks in their burrows.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These age classes are not well sampled by any traditional sampling methods in the region (Hinckley, Hermann, Mier, & Megrey, 2001;Springer & Speckman, 1997). Because seabirds specifically target these taxa and age classes for food, seabird "sampling" of the North Pacific prey base can complement traditional methods to inform us about fluctuations in fish stock abundance (e.g., Mills, Laidig, Ralston, & Sydeman, 2007;Renner, Mueter, Drummond, Warzybok, & Sinclair, 2012;Sydeman et al, 2017a), age structure and year class strength (e.g., Barrett, 2002;Hatch & Sanger, 1992;Miller & Sydeman, 2004), and geographic patterns of distribution (e.g., Springer, Piatt, & van Vliet, 1996;Thayer et al, 2008). When synthesized, this information may be used to better understand regional coastal pelagic food webs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Biogeography of pelagic food webs in the North Pacific

Piatt

Arimitsu

Sydeman

et al. 2018

Fisheries Oceanography

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The tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) is a generalist seabird that breeds throughout the North Pacific and eats more than 75 different prey species. Using puffins as samplers, we characterized the geographic variability in pelagic food webs across the subarctic North Pacific from the composition of ~10,000 tufted puffin meals (~56,000 prey items) collected at 35 colonies in the Gulf of Alaska (GoA) and Aleutian Archipelago. Cluster analysis of diet species composition suggested three distinct forage fish communities: (i) in the northern GoA, multiple age‐classes of coastal and shelf residents such as capelin, sand lance and herring dominated the food web, (ii) in the western GoA to eastern Aleutians, the shelf community was dominated by transient age‐0 walleye pollock, and (iii) in the western Aleutians, shelf‐edge and mesopelagic forage species such as squid, lanternfish, and Atka mackerel were prevalent. Geographic patterns of abundance of capelin and sand lance in tufted puffin diets were corroborated by independent research fisheries and diets of piscivorous fish, indicating that puffin diets reflect the local abundance of forage species, not just selection of favored species. Generalized additive models showed that habitat characteristics predict, in a non‐linear fashion, forage species distribution and abundance across two large marine ecosystems. We conclude that major biogeographic patterns in forage fish distribution follow gradients in key habitat features, and puffin diets reflect those patterns.

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Puffins reveal contrasting relationships between forage fish and ocean climate in the North Pacific

Cited by 42 publications

References 62 publications

Counting with DNA in metabarcoding studies: How should we convert sequence reads to dietary data?

Counting with DNA in metabarcoding studies: How should we convert sequence reads to dietary data?

Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016

Biogeography of pelagic food webs in the North Pacific

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