Pink Salmon as Sentinels for Climate Change in the Arctic

Abstract Excerpt:
The Pacific Arctic Region (PAR), that includes the northern Bering Sea (NBS), across the Chukchi Sea to the East Siberian and Beaufort seas, is experiencing significant warming and extremes in seasonal sea ice extent and thickness (Frey et al. 2014). Over the past decade, record summer sea ice minima (2007, 2011, 2012) have occurred and climate models predict that the southern Chukchi Sea will be sea ice free for five months (July to November) within a decade or two (Overland et al. 2014). These shifts to the PAR ecosystem are likely to have large impacts on the ecology of upper trophic level species (UTL, fishes, birds, and mammals; see Sigler et al. 2011). Because the UTL are typically top predators, they must adapt via biological responses to physical forcing and thereby become “sentinels” to ecosystem variability and reorganization (Moore et al. 2014). As such, there will likely be fishes that do better under climate warming and those that may not.