As fisheries management shifts to an ecosystem-based approach, understanding energy pathways and trophic relationships in the Northern California Current (NCC) will become increasingly important for predictive modeling and understanding ecosystem response to changing ocean conditions. In the NCC, pelagic forage fishes are a critical link between seasonal and interannual variation...
A majority of the world’s largest net-based fisheries target planktivorous forage fish that serve as a critical trophic link between the plankton and upper-level consumers such as large predatory fishes, seabirds, and marine mammals. Because the plankton production that drives forage fish also drives jellyfish production, these taxa often overlap...
This study investigated the spatial distribution of juvenile North Pacific albacore (Thunnus alalunga) in relation to local environmental variability
[i.e. sea surface temperature (SST)], and two large-scale indices of climate variability, [the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and theMultivariate
El Nino/Southern Oscillation Index (MEI)]. Changes in local and climate variables were...
Relative to extensive research on the freshwater stages of steelhead Oncorhynchus mykiss life history, little is known about the species’ estuarine and early marine phases despite the decline of numerous populations, including several from the Columbia River. Comparisons of the distribution, diet, and growth of juvenile steelhead collected during surveys...
The feeding habits of pelagic, juvenile rockfishes (Sebastes spp.) collected off Oregon in 2002, and Oregon and Washington in 2006, were examined using stomach content and stable isotope analyses. Sampling occurred along a series of transects across the shelf between Crescent City, California (Lat. 41°54.0′), and Newport, Oregon (Lat. 44°39.0′),...
As in many regions of the world, the shelf waters of the western United States have experienced large increases and high interannual variability in jellyfish populations in recent decades. The northern California Current (NCC) is a productive upwelling zone that is home to large populations of medusae, particularly during some...
The Fukushima Daiichi power station released
several radionuclides into the Pacific following the March 2011
earthquake and tsunami. A total of 26 Pacific albacore (Thunnus
alalunga) caught off the Pacific Northwest U.S. coast between
2008 and 2012 were analyzed for ¹³⁷Cs and Fukushima-attributed
¹³⁴Cs. Both 2011 (2 of 2) and...
End-to-end models were constructed to examine and compare the trophic structure and energy flow in coastal shelf ecosystems of four US Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) study regions: the Northern California Current, the Central Gulf of Alaska, Georges Bank, and the Southwestern Antarctic Peninsula. High-quality data collected on system components...
Variable ocean conditions can greatly impact
prey assemblages and predator foraging in marine ecosystems.
Our goal was to better understand how a change in
ocean conditions influenced dietary niche overlap among
a suite of midtrophic-level predators. We examined the
diets of three fishes and one seabird off central Oregon
during...
This report reviews the state of the California Current System (CCS) between winter 2012 and spring 2013, and includes observations from Washington State to Baja California. During 2012, large-scale climate modes indicated the CCS remained in a cool, productive phase present since 2007. The upwelling season was delayed north of...