Author:
Mackas D L,Thomson Richard E,Galbraith Moira
Abstract
A 15-year zooplankton time series collected off southern Vancouver Island (4849°N) shows large interannual anomalies of biomass for most major zooplankton species. Variations within groups of ecologically similar species have been more extreme (often 10-fold or greater) than the variation in total biomass (four- to six-fold). For both total biomass and species groups, the zooplankton anomalies develop and persist over time spans of several years and are correlated across a large spatial scale (>100 km longshore). One dominant mode of recent zooplankton variation was a 19901998 cumulative shift to a more "southerly" copepod and chaetognath fauna: order-of-magnitude declines in several species endemic to the Northeast Pacific continental shelf and order-of-magnitude increases of species endemic to the California Current (3545°N). This trend abruptly reversed in 1999. A second major mode of zooplankton variability consisted of roughly mirror-image fluctuations in the abundance of euphausiids versus subarctic oceanic copepods. Zooplankton anomalies were correlated with year-to-year changes in several physical environmental indices. The patterns of covariance suggest that zooplankton community composition responds strongly to ocean climate fluctuations and in particular to changing current patterns.
Publisher
Canadian Science Publishing
Subject
Aquatic Science,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Cited by
161 articles.
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