Award: OCE-2023536

This project assessed how marine fishes in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean are shifting in response to warming waters, leveraging existing datasets describing where these fishes are through time and what they eat. We not only quantified shifts in where these fishes are found across years, but also between spring and fall seasons. In addition, we also quantified how the diets of these fishes have shifted over the past ~50 years. First, we developed and published the most comprehensive database of aquatic organism energy densities, providing a valuable resource to researchers examining aquatic animal condition, energy transfer, predator-prey relationships, and bioenergetics. Then, through analyzing the diets of > 300,000 fish collected 1973-2019, we identified important shifts in feeding quality, including reduced consumption rates, reduced diversity in diets, and overall less energy being consumed. Collectively, these results suggest that feeding conditions are not of the same quality as they were 50 years ago. Reduced feeding quality across many diverse predators suggests that climate change and species-specific shifts can have complex and important consequences for fish feeding, with likely downstream consequences for these species’ populations and the fisheries they support. 

We also assessed how the spatial distributions of species in the Northwest Atlantic have changed between fall and spring seasons. Most species (19) exhibited distribution shifts in the spring and fall seasons moving in the same direction, creating a pattern of distributions marching northwards. However, 11 species showed converging patterns created by their spring locations shifting faster than their fall locations. Only two species demonstrated diverging patterns caused by their spring distribution moving further southward while their fall distributions shifted further northward. These patterns demonstrate that responses to warming waters can vary dramatically among species even in the same ecosystem.  

The middle school curriculum–A Warming Gulf of Maine: Investigating Impacts on Predators and Prey–was piloted by four teachers, which resulted in over 200 students completing the lessons as part of the pilot.  The true number of students experiencing the lessons is likely much higher. In addition, a total of 60 educators from across Maine and New Hampshire attended professional development workshops to prepare them to lead the curriculum in their own classrooms. Through these resources, a substantial number of secondary science students learned about predator-prey relationships, the importance of prey energy density, ocean ecosystems, and the potential consequences of environmental change on feeding opportunities of fishes. 

Last Modified: 12/22/2025
Modified by: Nathan B Furey