Tracking apex marine predator movements in a dynamic ocean

Abstract

Pelagic marine predators face unprecedented challenges and uncertain futures. Overexploitation and climate variability impact the abundance and distribution of top predators in ocean ecosystems. Improved understanding of ecological patterns, evolutionary constraints and ecosystem function is critical for preventing extinctions, loss of biodiversity and disruption of ecosystem services. Recent advances in electronic tagging techniques have provided the capacity to observe the movements and long-distance migrations of animals in relation to ocean processes across a range of ecological scales. Tagging of Pacific Predators, a field programme of the Census of Marine Life, deployed 4,306 tags on 23 species in the North Pacific Ocean, resulting in a tracking data set of unprecedented scale and species diversity that covers 265,386 tracking days from 2000 to 2009. Here we report migration pathways, link ocean features to multispecies hotspots and illustrate niche partitioning within and among congener guilds. Our results indicate that the California Current large marine ecosystem and the North Pacific transition zone attract and retain a diverse assemblage of marine vertebrates. Within the California Current large marine ecosystem, several predator guilds seasonally undertake north-south migrations that may be driven by oceanic processes, species-specific thermal tolerances and shifts in prey distributions. We identify critical habitats across multinational boundaries and show that top predators exploit their environment in predictable ways, providing the foundation for spatial management of large marine ecosystems.

Movements and habitat use of reef manta rays off eastern Australia: offshore excursions, deep diving and eddy affinity revealed by satellite telemetry

“…Advances in the fields of bio-logging science, geographic information systems and ecological modelling have led to the increasing use of animal-attached sensors to remotely examine the movements, behaviour, physiology and/or biophysical habitat of a wide range of marine species (Cooke et al 2004, Ropert-Coudert et al 2009. Such studies have shed new light on the ecology of marine predators, unravelling a variety of behaviours ranging from localised movements made in relation to foraging opportunities (Sims et al 2006, Papastamatiou et al 2012) to larger-scale migrations (Bonfil et al 2005, Block et al 2011. In most cases, movements are driven by the availability of food resources (Zerbini et al 2006, Anderson et al 2011, species-specific physiologies (Pillans 2006) or the need to reproduce (Bonfil et al 2005, Skomal et al 2009).…”

Predicting the distribution of a threatened albatross: The importance of competition, fisheries and annual variability

“…Although many attributes of marine communities are poorly known, valuable insights may be derived from studies on species thought to convey information on particular components, such as, for example, spatial and temporal variations in the abundance of prey (Block et al, 2011). Seabirds are relatively easy to study and thus are increasingly being used for environmental assessment and monitoring (Boyd et al, 2006).…”

Climate Change: Warming Impacts on Marine Biodiversity

“…Also in marine organisms, substantial shifts in spatial distribution ranges have been observed in organism groups from passively transported plankton to mobile top-predators (Beaugrand et al 2002;Atkinson et al 2008, Beaugrand et al 2009Montes-Hugo et al 2009, Block et al 2011Hazen et al 2013). In an unprecedented meta-analysis across locations and marine organism groups, Poloczanska et al (2013) (Parmesan and Yohe 2003;Chen et al 2011).…”