Nitrogen isotopic baselines and implications for estimating foraging habitat and trophic position of yellowfin tuna in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

Anne Lorrain; Brittany S. Graham; Brian N. Popp; Valérie Allain; Robert J. Olson; Brian P.V. Hunt; Michel Potier; Brian Fry; Felipe Galván-Magaña; Christophe E. Menkès; Sven Kaehler; Frédéric Ménard

doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2014.02.003

Journal articles

Nitrogen isotopic baselines and implications for estimating foraging habitat and trophic position of yellowfin tuna in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

Anne Lorrain ^{1, 2} Brittany S. Graham ³ Brian N. Popp ⁴ Valérie Allain ⁵ Robert J. Olson ⁶ Brian P.V. Hunt ^{7, 8} Michel Potier ^{9, 10, 11, 2} Brian Fry ¹² Felipe Galván-Magaña ¹³ Christophe E. Menkès ^{14, 15, 2} Sven Kaehler ¹⁶ Frédéric Ménard ^{11, 2}

1 LEMAR - Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Environnement Marin (LEMAR)

2 IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

3 NIWA - National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research [Wellington]

4 Department of Geology and Geophysics [Mānoa]

5 SPC - Pacific community

6 IATTC - Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission

7 MIO - Institut méditerranéen d'océanologie

8 UBC EOAS - Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences [Vancouver]

9 LACL - Laboratoire d'Algorithmique Complexité et Logique

10 UPEC UP12 - Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne - Paris 12

11 EME - UMR 212 EME "écosystèmes marins exploités"

12 Griffith University [Brisbane]

13 IPN - Instituto Politecnico Nacional [Mexico]

14 PEPS - Processus de couplage à Petite Echelle, Ecosystèmes et Prédateurs Supérieurs

LOCEAN - Laboratoire d'Océanographie et du Climat : Expérimentations et Approches Numériques

15 LOCEAN - Laboratoire d'Océanographie et du Climat : Expérimentations et Approches Numériques

16 Rhodes University, Grahamstown

Abstract : Assessment of isotopic compositions at the base of food webs is a prerequisite for using stable isotope analysis to assess foraging locations and trophic positions of marine organisms. Our study represents a unique application of stable-isotope analyses across multiple trophic levels (primary producer, primary consumer and tertiary consumer) and over a large spatial scale in two pelagic marine ecosystems. We found that delta N-15 values of particulate organic matter (POM), barnacles and phenylalanine from the muscle tissue of yellowfin tuna all showed similar spatial patterns. This consistency suggests that isotopic analysis of any of these can provide a reasonable proxy for isotopic variability at the base of the food web. Secondly, variations in the delta N-15 values of yellowfin tuna bulk-muscle tissues paralleled the spatial trends observed in all of these isotopic baseline proxies. Variation in isotopic composition at the base of the food web, rather than differences in tuna diet, explained the 11 parts per thousand variability observed in the bulk-tissue delta N-15 values of yellowfin tuna. Evaluating the trophic position of yellowfin tuna using amino-acid isotopic compositions across the western Indian and equatorial Pacific Oceans strongly suggests these tuna occupy similar trophic positions, albeit absolute trophic positions estimated by this method were lower than expected. This study reinforces the importance of considering isotopic baseline variability for diet studies, and provides new insights into methods that can be applied to generate nitrogen isoscapes for worldwide comparisons of top predators in marine ecosystems

Keywords : POM Barnacles Lepas anatifera Thunnus albacares Nitrogen stable isotopes Marine top predators Amino acids AA-CSIA ACL

Document type :

Journal articles

Domain :

Physics [physics] / Physics [physics] / Geophysics [physics.geo-ph]

Sciences of the Universe [physics] / Ocean, Atmosphere

Environmental Sciences / Biodiversity and Ecology

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Submitted on : Friday, April 3, 2015 - 6:40:38 PM
Last modification on : Tuesday, May 10, 2022 - 3:25:40 PM

Nitrogen isotopic baselines and implications for estimating foraging habitat and trophic position of yellowfin tuna in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

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Nitrogen isotopic baselines and implications for estimating foraging habitat and trophic position of yellowfin tuna in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

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