Department of Oceanography, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Sci Adv. 2018 Jul 25;4(7):eaar4349. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aar4349. eCollection 2018 Jul.
In seasonal environments, timing is everything: Ecosystem dynamics are controlled by how well predators can match their prey in space and time. This match of predator and prey is thought to be particularly critical for the vulnerable larval life stages of many fish, where limited parental investment means that population survival can depend on how well larvae match the timing of their food. We develop and apply novel metrics of thermal time to estimate the timing of unobserved stages of fish larvae and their prey across the north Atlantic. The result shows that previously identified life-history strategies are adaptive in that they allow parents to "predict" a beneficial environment for their offspring and meet larval fish food timing that varies by 99 days across a species' range.
在季节性环境中，时机至关重要：生态系统的动态受捕食者在空间和时间上与猎物匹配程度的控制。这种捕食者和猎物的匹配被认为对许多鱼类脆弱的幼虫阶段尤其关键，因为有限的父母投资意味着种群的生存可能取决于幼虫与食物时间的匹配程度。我们开发并应用了新的热时间度量标准来估计北大西洋鱼类幼虫及其猎物未观察到阶段的时间。结果表明，先前确定的生活史策略是适应性的，因为它们允许父母“预测”对后代有利的环境，并满足幼虫鱼类食物时间的变化，在一个物种的范围内变化了 99 天。
