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Climate change

A rewired food web

Nature volume 527, pages 173–174 (2015)Cite this article

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Climate change is causing large fish species to move into arctic marine environments. A network analysis finds that these fishes, with their generalist diets, add links to the existing food web that may alter biodiversity and web stability.

Climate change is driving species shifts both on land and in the sea. For species that inhabit extreme environments, such as the poles or highest altitudes, there may soon be nowhere left to go. The consequences of species redistributions for whole ecosystems are often discussed but poorly understood. This is due in part to the amount of information that is required to understand the complex networks of ecological interactions between organisms and their changing habitats. Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kortsch et al.1 combine network analysis with large-scale species-distribution data and detailed knowledge of food-web interactions — who eats whom — in the Barents Sea, which lies north of Norway and Russia. The authors use this information to show how changes in the distributions of the fastest-shifting fish species can substantially alter the structure of an arctic marine food web.

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Figure 1: Shifting structure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Julia L. Blanchard is at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia.,

    Julia L. Blanchard

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  1. Julia L. Blanchard
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Correspondence to Julia L. Blanchard.

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Fisheries: Climate change at the dinner table

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Blanchard, J. A rewired food web. Nature 527, 173–174 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16311

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