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GMRI Research Scientist, Pelagic Ecology
One of the most interesting projects I’m involved with is a collaborative effort by several members of GMRI’s science team to understand how climate change impacts fish through the food they eat and how seemingly small shifts in diet can ripple through the food web. For example, Atlantic herring’s prey of choice appears to be a tiny zooplankton called a copepod. We now suspect that even slight changes in the ocean’s temperature, salinity, and currents may disrupt copepod populations in the Gulf of Maine, impacting herring’s growth and reproduction. Because Atlantic bluefin tuna come into the region specifically to feed on large schools of herring, we are testing the hypothesis that the observed decline in condition of this large predator species is related to the availability of copepods to herring. 