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Climate variability and multi-scale assessment of the krill preyscape near the north Antarctic Peninsula

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Abstract

Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) densities vary in space and time across multiple scales, with consequences for krill predators, the krill fishery, and management decisions. We use acoustic data collected from 1997 to 2011 around the South Shetland Islands near the northern Antarctic Peninsula to quantify spatiotemporal patterns in krill biomass, distribution, and patchiness both within and across years. Moreover, we evaluate potential climate drivers of krill biomass and spatial organization through comparison with seasonally lagged climate indices. Krill abundance varied by an order of magnitude throughout the study period, with mean biomass ranging from a high of 171.9 g m−2 in 1997 to a low of 9.4 g m−2 in 2002. We find that across years, krill abundance and variability are correlated with seasonally averaged measures of El Niño-Southern Oscillation at lags of approximately 2–2.5 years, which may correspond to strong reproduction and recruitment events. Krill biomass shows generally weak to moderate spatial autocorrelation and high aggregation, with measures of spatial organization correlated with abundance in some habitats. Within years, there was an overall trend of declining krill abundance and/or detectability and contracted spatial distribution between midsummer and late summer, but this pattern was not consistent across all years. This synthesis provides the background to model krill prey landscapes in order to better understand regional foraging ecology of krill predators and fishery performance.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the US AMLR Program, especially GM Watters, CS Reiss and A Cossio, for creating and sharing this data set. This work was partially supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to KR and by the Center for Stock Assessment Research, a training program between the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and UC Santa Cruz. We thank three anonymous reviewers for thoughtful and helpful comments that improved the manuscript.

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  1. Kate Richerson

    Present address: Conservation Biology Division, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, 98112, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Stock Assessment Research, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA

    Kate Richerson, Jarrod A. Santora & Marc Mangel

  2. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA

    Kate Richerson

  3. Theoretical Ecology Group, Department of Biology, University of Bergen, 9020, Bergen, Norway

    Marc Mangel

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  1. Kate Richerson
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  2. Jarrod A. Santora
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Correspondence to Kate Richerson.

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Nonsignificant relationships between mean biomass density and descriptors of spatial organization in midsummer (PDF 588 kb)

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Nonsignificant relationships between mean biomass density and descriptors of spatial organization in late summer (PDF 736 kb)

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Richerson, K., Santora, J.A. & Mangel, M. Climate variability and multi-scale assessment of the krill preyscape near the north Antarctic Peninsula. Polar Biol 40, 697–711 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-016-1994-y

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