Recruitment failure of coastal predatory fish in the Baltic Sea is related to an offshore system shift

The dominant coastal predatory \ufb01sh in the southwestern Baltic Sea, perch and pike, have decreased markedly in abundance during the past decade. An investigation into their recruitment at 135 coastal sites showed that both species suffered from recruitment failures, mainly in open coastal areas. A detailed study of 15 sites showed that areas with recruitment problems were also notable for mortality of early-stage larvae at the onset of exogenous food-intake. At those sites, zooplankton abundance predicted 83 and 34% of the variation in young of the year perch and pike, respectively, suggesting that the declines were caused by recruitment failure attributable to zooplankton food limitation. Incidences of recruitment failure match in time an offshore trophic cascade that generated massive increases in planktivorous sprat and decreases in zooplankton biomass in the early 1990s. Therefore, sprat biomass explained 53% of the variation in perch recruitment from 1994 to 2007 at an open coastal site, where threespined stickleback also increased exponentially after 2002. The results indicate that the dramatic change in the offshore ecosystem may have propagated to the coast causing declines of the dominating coastal predators perch and pike followed by an increase in the abundance of small-bodied \ufb01sh

Double photodetachment from the Cl[-]ion

The correlated process involving the photodetachment of two electrons from the [Formula Presented] ion has been investigated over the photon energy range 20–45 eV. In the experiment, a beam of photons from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) was collinearly merged with a counterpropagating beam of [Formula Presented] ions from a sputter ion source. The [Formula Presented] ions produced in the interaction region were detected, and the normalized signal was used to monitor the relative cross section for the reaction. An absolute scale for the cross section was established by measuring the spatial overlap of the two beams and by determining the efficiency for collection and detection of the [Formula Presented] ions. The overall magnitude and shape of the measured cross section for this process agrees well with an R-matrix calculation. The calculation identifies the dominant mechanism leading to the production of the [Formula Presented] ion as being a direct nonresonant process involving the ejection of a pair of electrons from the valence shell. Less important is the indirect nonresonant process that involves the production and decay of core-excited and doubly excited states of the Cl atom in an intermediate step. Direct and indirect resonant mechanisms involving the excitation of a single [Formula Presented] core electron or more than one valence electron of the [Formula Presented] ion were found to be insignificant in the energy range studied

Observation of an excited C2-4 ion

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the electron impact detachment of C−4. We observe structure in the electron impact cross section for detaching a single electron from a C−4 cluster anion, which we attribute to the formation and decay of the C2−4 dianion. The system is energetically unstable and very rapidly decays via double autodetachment. The energy and width of the resonance were determined to be 8.8(5) eV and 1.4(5) eV, respectively, and the resonance lies 1.5(5) eV above the ground state of the neutral system. The experiment was conducted by merging monoenergetic electron and ion beams in the heavy ion storage ring CRYRING. The detachment channel was monitored by detecting neutral C4 fragments