Seawater carbonate chemistry and survival of herring larvae, Clupea harengus L., under projected end-of-the-century CO2-levels

DOI

Ocean acidification—the decrease in seawater pH due to rising CO2 concentrations—has been shown to lower survival in early life stages of fish and, as a consequence, the recruitment of populations including commercially important species. To date, ocean-acidification studies with fish larvae have focused on the direct physiological impacts of elevated CO2 , but largely ignored the potential effects of ocean acidification on food web interactions. In an in situ mesocosm study on Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) larvae as top predators in a pelagic food web, we account for indirect CO2 effects on larval survival mediated by changes in food availability. The community was exposed to projected end-of-the-century CO2 conditions (~760 µatm pCO2 ) over a period of 113 days. In contrast with laboratory studies that reported a decrease in fish survival, the survival of the herring larvae in situ was significantly enhanced by 19 ± 2%. Analysis of the plankton community dynamics suggested that the herring larvae benefitted from a CO2 -stimulated increase in primary production. Such indirect effects may counteract the possible direct negative effects of ocean acidification on the survival of fish early life stages. These findings emphasize the need to assess the food web effects of ocean acidification on fish larvae before we can predict even the sign of change in fish recruitment in a high-CO2 ocean.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2022) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2023-05-29.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.959519
Related Identifier IsSupplementTo https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0514-6
Related Identifier References https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.924457
Related Identifier IsDerivedFrom https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.882406
Related Identifier IsDocumentedBy https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/index.html
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.959519
Provenance
Creator Sswat, Michael ORCID logo; Stiasny, Martina H ORCID logo; Taucher, Jan ORCID logo; Algueró-Muñiz, Maria; Bach, Lennart Thomas ORCID logo; Jutfelt, Fredrik ORCID logo; Riebesell, Ulf (ORCID: 0000-0002-9442-452X); Clemmesen, Catriona ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Ludwig, Andrea; Anderson, Leif G; Esposito, Mario; Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2023
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 16110 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (11.477W, 58.266S, 11.479E, 58.269N); Gullmar Fjord, Skagerrak, Sweden
Temporal Coverage Begin 2013-03-10T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2013-06-22T00:00:00Z