Abstract
There is increasing evidence that regime shifts occur at several scales in ecosystems (from the spatiotemporal alternation of two species to large-scale, ecosystem-level rearrangements). Yet, the theoretical background for understanding these changes is far from clear. Since fishing down in marine ecosystems is well-documented trend, and its top-down cascading effects in food webs have been richly documented, it is a current question whether overfishing, in general, can also influence regime shifts at lower levels. We model simple marine ecosystems by dynamical food webs and investigate the probability of regime shifts emerging among primary consumers. We considered cases where only one of the primary consumers is persistent in the stationary state. By perturbing the death rates in the food web, we studied the circumstances when the previously persistent primary producer is indirectly changed by the previously non-persistent one. Whether and how regime shifts (e.g., change in primary consumers) can occur depends on (1) food web topology (presence of top-predator and alternative producer), (2) the relative strength of perturbation of primary consumers’ death rates, and (3) the dynamical parameters of the recovering consumer. We found that overfishing, food web topology and dynamical parameters together determine the probability of regime shifts. Thus, integrative and complex models are needed in multispecies fisheries.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Bakun, A. 1996. Patterns in the Ocean: Ocean Processes and Marine Population Dynamics. University of California Sea Grant, San Diego, California.
Bakun, A. and K. Broad. 2003. Environmental ‘loopholes’ and fish population dynamics: comparative pattern recognition with focus on El Nino effects in the Pacific. Fish. Oceanogr. 12:458–473.
Bakun, A. and P. Cury. 1999. The „school trap”: a mechanism promoting large-amplitude out-of-phase population oscillations of small pelagic fish species. Ecol. Lett. 2:349–351.
Bakun A. and S.J. Weeks. 2004. Greenhouse gas buildup, sardines, submarine eruptions and the possibility of abrupt degradation of intense marine upwelling ecosystems. Ecol. Lett. 7:1015–1023.
Barkai, A. and C. McQuaid. 1988. Predator-prey role reversal in a marine benthic ecosystem. Science 242:62–64.
Brose, U., Berlow, E.L. and Martinez, N.D. 2005. Scaling up keystone effects from simple to complex ecological networks. Ecol. Lett. 8:1317–1325.
Chavez, F.P., J. Ryan, S.E. Lluch-Cota and C.M. Niquen. 2003. From anchovies to sardines and back: multidecadal change in the Pacific Ocean. Science 299:217–221.
Coll, M., A. Santojanni, I. Palomera, S. Tudela and E. Arneri. 2007. An ecological model of the Northern and Central Adriatic Sea: analysis of ecosystem structure and fishing impacts. J. Mar. Syst. 67:119–154.
Coll, M., L.J. Shannon, C.L. Moloney, I. Palomera and S. Tudela. 2006. Comparing trophic flows and fishing impacts of a NW Mediterranean ecosystem with coastal upwelling systems by means of standardized models and indicators. Ecol. Model. 198:53–70.
Cury, P., A. Bakun, R.J.M. Crawford, A. Jarre, R.A. Quiñones, L.J. Shannon and H.M. Verheye. 2000. Small pelagics in upwelling systems: patterns of interaction and structural changes in “waspwaist” ecosystems. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 57:603–618.
Cury, P. and L. Shannon. 2004. Regime shifts in upwelling ecosystems: observed changes and possible mechanisms in the northern and southern Benguela. Progr. Oceanogr. 60:223–243.
Daskalov, G.M. 2002. Overfishing drives a trophic cascade in the Black Sea. Mar. Ecol. Progr. Ser. 225: 53–63.
Daskalov, G.M., A.N. Grishin, S. Rodionov and V. Mihneva. 2007. Trophic cascades triggered by overfishing reveal possible mechanisms of ecosystem regime shifts. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104:10518–10523.
Edwards M. and A.J. Richardson. 2004. Impact of climate change on marine pelagic phenology and trophic mismatch. Nature 430:881–884.
Jarre-Teichmann, A. 1998. The potential role of mass balance models for the management of upwelling ecosystems. Ecol. Appl. 8:S93–S103.
Jennings, S. and M.J. Kaiser. 1998. The effects of fishing on marine ecosystems. Adv. Mar. Biol. 34:201–352.
Jordán, F. 2005. Topological constraints on the dynamics of waspwaist ecosystems. In: Velikova, V. and N. Chipev (eds.), Largescale Disturbances (Regime Shifts) and Recovery in Aquatic Ecosystems: Challenges for Management towards Sustainability. UNESCO-ROSTE/BAS Workshop on Regime Shifts, 14–16 June 2005, Varna, Bulgaria,, pp. 58–67.
Jordán, F., W.C. Liu. and T. Wyatt. 2005. Topological constraints on the dynamics of wasp-waist ecosystems. J. Mar. Syst. 57:250–263.
Jordán, F. and T. Wyatt. 2006. A graph theory examination of the global spreading hypothesis. Afr. J. Mar. Sci. 28:371–374.
May, R.M., J.R. Beddington, C.W. Clark, S.J. Holt and R.M. Laws. 1979. Management of multispecies fisheries. Science 205:267–277.
Menge, B.A. 1995. Indirect effects in marine rocky intertidal interaction webs: patterns and importance. Ecol. Monogr. 65:21–74.
Pauly, D., V. Christensen, J. Dalsgaard, R. Froese and F. Torres. 1998. Fishing down marine food webs. Science 279:860–863.
Press, W. H., B. P. Flannery, S. A. Teukolsky and W. T. Wetterling. 1992. Numerical recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Rice, J. 1995. Food web theory, marine food webs, and what climate change may do to northern marine fish populations. In: Beamish, R.J. (ed.), Climate Change and Northern Fish Populations. Canadian Special Publication of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Vol. 121. pp. 561–568, Canadian Government Publishing, Victoria, British Columbia.
Scheffer M. and S.R. Carpenter. 2003. Catastrophic regime shifts in ecosystems: linking theory to observation. TREE 18:648–656.
Shannon, L.J. and P.M. Cury. 2003. Indicators quantifying small pelagic fish interactions: application using a trophic model of the southern Benguela ecosystem. Ecol. Indic. 3:305–321.
Shiganova, T.A. 1998. Invasion of the Black Sea by the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi and recent changes in pelagic community structure. Fish. Oceanogr. 7:305–310.
Spiller, D.A. and T.W. Schoener. 1998. Lizards reduce spider species richness by excluding rare species. Ecology 79:503–516.
Vasas, V., C. Lancelot, V. Rousseau and F. Jordán. 2007. Eutrophication and overfishing in temperate nearshore pelagic food webs: a network perspective. Mar. Ecol. Progr. Ser. 336:1–14.
Yodzis, P. 2000. Diffuse effects in food webs. Ecology 81:261–266.
Yodzis, P. 2001. Must top predators be culled for the sake of fisheries? TREE 16:78–84.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Móréh, Á., Jordáz, F., Szilágyi, A. et al. Overfishing and regime shifts in minimal food web models. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 10, 236–243 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.10.2009.2.14
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.10.2009.2.14