Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 May 6;111(18):E1880-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1319089111. Epub 2014 Mar 31.
Climate change in the last century was associated with spectacular growth of many wild Pacific salmon stocks in the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea, apparently through bottom-up forcing linking meteorology to ocean physics, water temperature, and plankton production. One species in particular, pink salmon, became so numerous by the 1990s that they began to dominate other species of salmon for prey resources and to exert top-down control in the open ocean ecosystem. Information from long-term monitoring of seabirds in the Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea reveals that the sphere of influence of pink salmon is much larger than previously known. Seabirds, pink salmon, other species of salmon, and by extension other higher-order predators, are tightly linked ecologically and must be included in international management and conservation policies for sustaining all species that compete for common, finite resource pools. These data further emphasize that the unique 2-y cycle in abundance of pink salmon drives interannual shifts between two alternate states of a complex marine ecosystem.
上个世纪的气候变化与北太平洋和白令海许多野生太平洋三文鱼种群的显著增长有关，这显然是通过从底层向上的强迫作用将气象学与海洋物理学、水温和浮游生物产量联系起来。特别是一种名为粉鲑的物种，到 20 世纪 90 年代变得如此之多，以至于它们开始主导其他三文鱼物种的猎物资源，并在开阔海洋生态系统中发挥自上而下的控制作用。来自阿留申群岛和白令海海鸟长期监测的信息表明，粉鲑的影响范围比以前所知的要大得多。海鸟、粉鲑、其他三文鱼物种，以及其他更高阶的捕食者，在生态上紧密相连，必须纳入国际管理和保护政策，以维持所有争夺共同有限资源池的物种。这些数据进一步强调，粉鲑丰度的独特 2 年周期驱动了复杂海洋生态系统两种替代状态之间的年际变化。
