Titel
Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
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Abstract
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.
Stichwort
climate changeotolithglacialinterglacialconnectivityPleistocene
Objekt-Typ
Sprache
Englisch [eng]
Persistent identifier
Erschienen in
Titel
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Band
290
Ausgabe
1990
ISSN
0962-8452
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Publication
The Royal Society
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Zugänglichkeit
Rechte
Rechteangabe
© 2023 The Authors
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