Elephant seals as ecosystem sentinels for the northeast Pacific Ocean twilight zone
The open ocean twilight zone holds most of the global fish biomass but is poorly understood owing to difficulties of measuring subsurface ecosystem processes at scale. We demonstrate that a wide-ranging carnivore-the northern elephant seal-can serve as an ecosystem sentinel for the twilight zone. We link ocean basin-scale foraging success with oceanographic indices to estimate twilight zone fish abundance five decades into the past, and into the future. We discovered that a small variation in maternal foraging success amplified into larger changes in offspring body mass and enormous variation in first-year survival and recruitment. Worsening oceanographic conditions could shift predator population trajectories from current growth to sharp declines. As ocean integrators, wide-ranging predators could reveal impacts of future anthropogenic change on open ocean ecosystems.
Authors
- A. Marm Kilpatrick (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3612-5775)
- Elliott L. Hazen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0412-7178)
- Joanne Reiter (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1215-940X)
- Patrick W. Robinson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3957-8347)
- Daniel P. Costa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0233-5782)
- Wade Matern (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8418-9888)
- Allison Coughlin
- Burney J. Le Bœuf (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7952-2930)
- Steven J. Bograd (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3872-9932)
- Allison R. Payne (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6107-4252)
- Roxanne S. Beltran (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8520-1105)
- Joffrey Jouma’a (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2862-0899)
- Nicholas A. Heredia
- M.E. Reed (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5808-9204)
- Meghan Sherrier (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7857-7737)
- Conner M. Hale (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9926-1084)
- Ben Peterson
- Kathryn Lewis
- Emma Houle
- Alea Sabah
- Samantha Sebandal (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-9828-4810)
- Francesca Penny
- Sophie Rose Dalrymple
- Heather Penny
Institutions
- NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (US)
- University of California, Santa Cruz (US)
- NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Southwest Fisheries Science Center (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Science
- Published
- 2025-02-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp2244
- Citations
- 9
- Primary Topic
- Marine animal studies overview
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 15.45