September 28, 2021 — Climate change is redistributing biodiversity globally, and distributional shifts of organisms often follow the speed and direction of environmental changes. Research by scientists at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) reveals that this phenomenon is affecting where large marine mammals are distributed relative to their prey species, which could have important implications for marine food web dynamics. Their findings are published in Scientific Reports.
Marine mammals (endotherms), such as whales and dolphins, are often assumed to shift their movements and distribution in response to warming waters more slowly than their ectothermic prey, such as fish and squid, whose growth and productivity is directly impacted by water temperature. Since marine mammals are large, highly mobile and occur across wide geographic ranges, distributional shifts in these species are difficult to quantify. In this study, data from fisheries bycatch and stranding events is used to examine changes in the distribution of long-finned pilot whales and their prey relative to climate velocity in a rapidly warming region of the Northwest Atlantic.
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