Mesoscale eddies modulate the dynamics of human fishing activities in the global midlatitude ocean

Abstract

AbstractFrequent fishing activities are causing overfishing, destroying the habitat of marine life, and threatening global marine biodiversity. Understanding the dynamics of fishing activities and their drivers is crucial for designing and implementing effective ocean management. The fishing activities in the open sea are reported to be characterized by high spatial variability in local waters; however, it is still unclear whether their high spatial variability is random or regulated by oceanographic variations. Mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous swirling currents that dominate locally biogeochemical processes. Previous case studies presented an ongoing debate regarding how eddies exert impacts on high trophic organisms, which imposes limitations on understanding the dynamics of fishing activities based on the bottom‐top control hypothesis from eddies to fish and fishing activities. By combining global fishing activities from deep learning and oceanic eddy atlases from satellite monitoring, we showed that the spatial variations in fishing activities were closely related to mesoscale eddies in the global midlatitude ocean, confirming that fishing activities primarily targeting tuna, were aggregated in (repelled from) anticyclonic (cyclonic) eddy cores. This eddy‐fishing activity relationship was opposite to satellite‐observed primary production but corresponded well with the temperature and oxygen content in deeper water. By integrating existing evidence, we attribute eddy‐related fishing activities to a reasonable hypothesis that warm and oxygen‐rich deeper water in anticyclonic eddies relieves the thermal and anoxic constraints for diving predation by tuna while the constraints are aggravated in cold and oxygen‐poor cyclonic eddies.