23 research outputs found

    Ticket to spawn: Combining economic and genetic data to evaluate the effect of climate and demographic structure on spawning distribution in Atlantic cod

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    Climate warming and harvesting affect the dynamics of species across the globe through a multitude of mechanisms, including distribution changes. In fish, migrations to and distribution on spawning grounds are likely influenced by both climate warming and harvesting. The Northeast Arctic (NEA) cod (Gadus morhua) performs seasonal migrations from its feeding grounds in the Barents Sea to spawning grounds along the Norwegian coast. The distribution of cod between the spawning grounds has historically changed at decadal scales, mainly due to variable use of the northern and southern margins of the spawning area. Based on historical landing records, two major hypotheses have been put forward to explain these changes: climate and harvesting. Climate could affect the distribution through, for example, spatial habitat shifts. Harvesting could affect the distribution through impacting the demographic structure. If demographic structure is important, theory predicts increasing spawner size with migration distance. Here, we evaluate these hypotheses with modern data from a period (2000–2016) of increasing temperature and recovering stock structure. We first analyze economic data from the Norwegian fisheries to investigate geographical differences in size of spawning fish among spawning grounds, as well as interannual differences in mean latitude of spawning in relation to changes in temperature and demographic parameters. Second, we analyze genetically determined fish sampled at the spawning grounds to unambiguously separate between migratory NEA cod and potentially smaller sized coastal cod of local origin. Our results indicate smaller spawners farther away from the feeding grounds, hence not supporting the hypothesis that harvesting is a main driver for the contemporary spawning ground distribution. We find a positive correlation between annual mean spawning latitude and temperature. In conclusion, based on contemporary data, there is more support for climate compared to harvesting in shaping spawning ground distribution in this major fish stock in the North Atlantic Ocean

    Resource-oriented music therapy for psychiatric patients with low therapy motivation: Protocol for a randomised controlled trial [NCT00137189]

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    BACKGROUND: Previous research has shown positive effects of music therapy for people with schizophrenia and other mental disorders. In clinical practice, music therapy is often offered to psychiatric patients with low therapy motivation, but little research exists about this population. The aim of this study is to examine whether resource-oriented music therapy helps psychiatric patients with low therapy motivation to improve negative symptoms and other health-related outcomes. An additional aim of the study is to examine the mechanisms of change through music therapy. METHODS: 144 adults with a non-organic mental disorder (ICD-10: F1 to F6) who have low therapy motivation and a willingness to work with music will be randomly assigned to an experimental or a control condition. All participants will receive standard care, and the experimental group will in addition be offered biweekly sessions of music therapy over a period of three months. Outcomes will be measured by a blind assessor before and 1, 3, and 9 months after randomisation. DISCUSSION: The findings to be expected from this study will fill an important gap in the knowledge of treatment effects for a patient group that does not easily benefit from treatment. The study's close link to clinical practice, as well as its size and comprehensiveness, will make its results well generalisable to clinical practice

    Associations between timing and magnitude of spring blooms and zooplankton dynamics in the southwestern Barents Sea

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    During the past decades, many high-latitude marine systems have experienced a strong warming trend with poorly understood consequences for trophic coupling and ecosystem functioning. A key knowledge gap is how timing and magnitude of phytoplankton blooms influence higher trophic levels. We investigated associations between timing and magnitude of phytoplankton blooms and dynamics of 3 size fractions of mesozooplankton from 1998 to 2019. The study focused on the southwestern Barents Sea, an Arctic shelf sea area that is dominated by relatively warm Atlantic waters and which remains ice-free year-round. Results showed that an early spring bloom (late April to early May) was associated with high biomass of medium-sized (1-2 mm) zooplankton in areas ‘downstream’ of the phytoplankton bloom, along the prevailing currents. Conversely, a late spring bloom was associated with high biomass of small-sized (0.180-1 mm) zooplankton, with no spatial shift. High peak magnitude of the bloom (>5 mg chl a m-3) was associated with low zooplankton biomass, suggesting either top-down control or that the zooplankton utilized intense and presumably short blooms inefficiently. For small- and large-sized (>2 mm) zooplankton, the relationship was nonlinear, as zooplankton biomass was also low when bloom peak magnitude was very low (<4 mg chl a m-3). Our findings imply that if phytoplankton blooms in the region occur earlier, this will increase the biomass of medium-sized zooplankton that are important prey for planktivorous fishes. Moreover, our study highlights that increased biomass of phytoplankton does not necessarily translate into increased zooplankton biomass

    Cascading effects of mass mortality events in Arctic marine communities

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    Mass mortality events caused by pulse anthropogenic or environmental perturbations (e.g., extreme weather, toxic spills or epizootics) severely reduce the abundance of a population in a short time. The frequency and impact of these events are likely to increase across the globe. Studies on how such events may affect ecological communities of interacting species are scarce. By combining a multispecies Gompertz model with a Bayesian state‐space framework, we quantify community‐level effects of a mass mortality event in a single species. We present a case study on a community of fish and zooplankton in the Barents Sea to illustrate how a mass mortality event of different intensities affecting the lower trophic level (krill) may propagate to higher trophic levels (capelin and cod). This approach is especially valuable for assessing community‐level effects of potential anthropogenic‐driven mass mortality events, owing to the ability to account for uncertainty in the assessed impact due to uncertainty about the ecological dynamics. We hence quantify how the assessed impact of a mass mortality event depends on the degree of precaution considered. We suggest that this approach can be useful for assessing the possible detrimental outcomes of toxic spills, for example oil spills, in relatively simple communities such as often found in the Arctic, a region under increasing influence of human activities due to increased land and sea use

    Climate and population density drive changes in cod body size throughout a century on the Norwegian coast

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    Understanding how populations respond to changes in climate requires long-term, high-quality datasets, which are rare for marine systems. We estimated the effects of climate warming on cod lengths and length variability using a unique 91-y time series of more than 100,000 individual juvenile cod lengths from surveys that began in 1919 along the Norwegian Skagerrak coast. Using linear mixed-effects models, we accounted for spatial population structure and the nested structure of the survey data to reveal opposite effects of spring and summer warming on juvenile cod lengths. Warm summer temperatures in the coastal Skagerrak have limited juvenile growth. In contrast, warmer springs have resulted in larger juvenile cod, with less variation in lengths within a cohort, possibly because of a temperature-driven contraction in the spring spawning period. A density-dependent reduction in length was evident only at the highest population densities in the time series, which have rarely been observed in the last decade. If temperatures rise because of global warming, nonlinearities in the opposing temperature effects suggest that negative effects of warmer summers will increasingly outweigh positive effects of warmer springs, and the coastal Skagerrak will become ill-suited for Atlantic cod

    Climate change and spring-fruiting fungi

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    Most macrofungi produce ephemeral fruit bodies during autumn but some have adapted to spring fruiting. In this study, temporal changes in the time of spring fruiting in Norway and the UK during 1960–2007 have been investigated by statistical analyses of about 6000 herbarium and field records, covering 34 species. Nearly 30 per cent of the temporal variation in fruiting could be ascribed to spatial and species-specific effects. Correcting for these effects, linear trends towards progressively earlier fruiting were detected during the entire period in both Norway and the UK, with a change in average fruiting day of 18 days over the study period. Early fruiting was correlated with high winter temperatures in both countries, indicating that the observed phenological changes are likely due to earlier onset of spring. There were also significant correlations between climatic conditions in one year and timing of fruiting the following year, indicating that below-ground mycelia are influenced by climatic conditions over a longer time period before fruiting. Fruiting dates were, however, not strictly related to changes in vernal accumulated thermal time. Our results indicate that global warming has lead to progressively earlier fruiting of spring fungi in northwest Europe during the last half century

    Relationships among variables in the Arctic and eastern Atlantic region of the Barents Sea.

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    <p>Red indicates significant Pearson correlation coefficients taking autocorrelation into account (*** p<0.001, ** p<0.01, * p< = 0.05; coefficients <0.4 are not shown, see also Supporting information <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0095273#pone.0095273.s004" target="_blank">Table S2</a>&3). (1) Pelagic fish vs. zooplankton 180–1000 ”m; (2) capelin vs. sum zooplankton (or capelin vs. zooplankton 1000–2000 ”m, r = –0.79*); (3) NPP vs. zooplankton 180–1000 ”m; (4) capelin vs. zooplankton 180–1000 ”m (or capelin vs. zooplankton >2000 ”m, r = –0.54); (5) Chl <i>a</i> vs. sum zooplankton (or Chl <i>a</i> vs. zooplankton >2000 ”m, r = 0.72**).</p
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