Rathnayaka Mudiyanselage, Wajra Jeewantha Bandara. Interaction between temperature and oxygen helps define fish biogeography. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-kdq5-0313
DescriptionGlobal climate change has had a substantial impact on marine biogeography and many species have experienced large spatial redistributions. While many approaches to understanding these changes focus on thermal habitat, theory from physiology and ecology suggest that oxygen and prey should also be important constraints on species distributions and important drivers of changing distributions. Here, we test whether oxygen, a measure of temperature-induced hypoxia (the Metabolic Index), and prey availability improve our ability to explain historical shifts in the distribution of Black Sea Bass (Centropristis striata). Estimates of prey availability and oxygen were calculated from a regional oceanographic hindcast. The best performing model included the Metabolic Index, demonstrating how correlative approaches for species habitat modeling can be strengthened by including variables with mechanistic links to physiology. To better understand species on the move in the ocean, we encourage further efforts to measure, model, and interpolate oxygen availability, as well as the development of methods to extrapolate temperature-dependent hypoxia across a wider range of species.