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Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean

Mesopelagic fishes are an important element of marine food webs, a huge, still mostly untapped food resource and great contributors to the biological carbon pump, whose future under climate change scenarios is unknown. The shrinking of commercial fishes within decades has been an alarming observatio...

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Autores principales: Agiadi, Konstantina, Quillévéré, Frédéric, Nawrot, Rafał, Sommeville, Theo, Coll, Marta, Koskeridou, Efterpi, Fietzke, Jan, Zuschin, Martin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832546/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36629116
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1994
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author Agiadi, Konstantina
Quillévéré, Frédéric
Nawrot, Rafał
Sommeville, Theo
Coll, Marta
Koskeridou, Efterpi
Fietzke, Jan
Zuschin, Martin
author_facet Agiadi, Konstantina
Quillévéré, Frédéric
Nawrot, Rafał
Sommeville, Theo
Coll, Marta
Koskeridou, Efterpi
Fietzke, Jan
Zuschin, Martin
author_sort Agiadi, Konstantina
collection PubMed
description Mesopelagic fishes are an important element of marine food webs, a huge, still mostly untapped food resource and great contributors to the biological carbon pump, whose future under climate change scenarios is unknown. The shrinking of commercial fishes within decades has been an alarming observation, but its causes remain contended. Here, we investigate the effect of warming climate on mesopelagic fish size in the eastern Mediterranean Sea during a glacial–interglacial–glacial transition of the Middle Pleistocene (marine isotope stages 20–18; 814–712 kyr B.P.), which included a 4°C increase in global seawater temperature. Our results based on fossil otoliths show that the median size of lanternfishes, one of the most abundant groups of mesopelagic fishes in fossil and modern assemblages, declined by approximately 35% with climate warming at the community level. However, individual mesopelagic species showed different and often opposing trends in size across the studied time interval, suggesting that climate warming in the interglacial resulted in an ecological shift toward increased relative abundance of smaller sized mesopelagic fishes due to geographical and/or bathymetric distribution range shifts, and the size-dependent effects of warming.
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spelling pubmed-98325462023-01-14 Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean Agiadi, Konstantina Quillévéré, Frédéric Nawrot, Rafał Sommeville, Theo Coll, Marta Koskeridou, Efterpi Fietzke, Jan Zuschin, Martin Proc Biol Sci Palaeobiology Mesopelagic fishes are an important element of marine food webs, a huge, still mostly untapped food resource and great contributors to the biological carbon pump, whose future under climate change scenarios is unknown. The shrinking of commercial fishes within decades has been an alarming observation, but its causes remain contended. Here, we investigate the effect of warming climate on mesopelagic fish size in the eastern Mediterranean Sea during a glacial–interglacial–glacial transition of the Middle Pleistocene (marine isotope stages 20–18; 814–712 kyr B.P.), which included a 4°C increase in global seawater temperature. Our results based on fossil otoliths show that the median size of lanternfishes, one of the most abundant groups of mesopelagic fishes in fossil and modern assemblages, declined by approximately 35% with climate warming at the community level. However, individual mesopelagic species showed different and often opposing trends in size across the studied time interval, suggesting that climate warming in the interglacial resulted in an ecological shift toward increased relative abundance of smaller sized mesopelagic fishes due to geographical and/or bathymetric distribution range shifts, and the size-dependent effects of warming. The Royal Society 2023-01-11 2023-01-11 /pmc/articles/PMC9832546/ /pubmed/36629116 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1994 Text en © 2023 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Palaeobiology
Agiadi, Konstantina
Quillévéré, Frédéric
Nawrot, Rafał
Sommeville, Theo
Coll, Marta
Koskeridou, Efterpi
Fietzke, Jan
Zuschin, Martin
Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
title Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
title_full Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
title_fullStr Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
title_full_unstemmed Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
title_short Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
title_sort palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during pleistocene climate warming in the eastern mediterranean
topic Palaeobiology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832546/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36629116
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1994
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