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Climatic influence on a marine fish assemblage

Nature volume 417, pages 275–278 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

Understanding the fluctuations in marine fish stocks is important for the management of fisheries, and attempts have been made to demonstrate links with oceanographic and climatic variability1,2,3, including the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)4,5. The NAO has been correlated with a range of long-term ecological measures6,7, including certain fish stocks8,9. Such environmental influences are most likely to affect susceptible juveniles10 during estuarine residency, as estuaries are critical juvenile nursery or over-wintering habitats11. Here we show that, during a 16-year period, climatic forcing (by means of the NAO) is consistently the most important parameter explaining variation in assemblage composition, abundance and growth of juvenile marine fish during estuarine residency. A possible mechanism for the effect of the NAO is a temperature differential between estuarine and marine waters that allows fish to facultatively exploit optimal thermal habitats. The connection has potentially important implications for the size and numbers of individuals recruited to the fishery, for understanding and predicting the composition of juvenile fish stocks using estuaries, and for the appropriate conservation of estuarine systems in relation to fish stocks.

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Figure 1: Examples of relationships between NAOI and fish assemblage, population and growth measures.
Figure 2: Differential in minimum recorded water temperatures (°C) between the Thames estuary and southern North Sea (solid line), together with NAOI (dashed line) for the period 1977–92.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Environment Agency for permission to analyse and publish the data. Support for completion of the work was provided by an NSERC research grant to M.P.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK

    Martin J. Attrill

  2. Department of Biology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Ontario, Canada

    Michael Power

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Correspondence to Martin J. Attrill.

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The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

41586_2002_BF417275a_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Details of sampling and statistical methodology, with full results of analysis and discussion with references (PDF 66 kb)

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Attrill, M., Power, M. Climatic influence on a marine fish assemblage. Nature 417, 275–278 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/417275a

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