Palaeontological evidence for community-level decrease in mesopelagic fish size during Pleistocene climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean
- Author(s)
- Konstantina Agiadi, Frédéric Quillévéré, Rafał Nawrot, Theo Sommeville, Marta Coll, Efterpi Koskeridou, Jan Fietzke, Martin Zuschin
- 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.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Palaeontology
- External organisation(s)
- Université Claude-Bernard-Lyon-I, IMBRSea Program, Ghent University , Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, GEOMAR Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung, Universität Wien
- Journal
- Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences
- Volume
- 290
- ISSN
- 0962-8452
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.10.04.510798
- Publication date
- 01-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 106021 Marine biology, 105118 Palaeontology, 401903 Fishery
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all), Immunology and Microbiology(all), Environmental Science(all), Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all)
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 13 - Climate Action
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/palaeontological-evidence-for-communitylevel-decrease-in-mesopelagic-fish-size-during-pleistocene-climate-warming-in-the-eastern-mediterranean(b6bf96ab-9dbd-401f-bce8-e0daf2142e09).html