Photo by Dr Banas
“To really understand ocean change the local voices I would most like to hear from are the fish and the birds. Forage fish like sandeel, herring, and sprat must be the best observers of changes in the plankton that are too big and too diffuse for us to see clearly. And diving seabirds like gannets, guillemots, and kittiwakes must be the best observers of changes in the forage fish, not just their numbers but their size and fatness and habits. But the birds and fish are really hard to interview--although that’s really what a lot of field marine biology boils down to.
When we design mathematical models of food-web interactions, we’re trying to imagine the perspective that the birds and fish would take if they could explain themselves. How much are a lot of small, skinny prey worth compared to one perfect large one? How much later in the year can the good-quality prey arrive before they aren’t useful anymore? The complexity of understanding climate change impacts on food webs comes from the pileup of these sorts of questions across many levels of the food chain.
As beach-walkers we see the ocean on a certain scale, the scale of pebbles, oystercatchers, and the view across a sea loch. That view is cross-crossed by stories: a year in the life of a porpoise, the loss of one fishery and the rise of another, climate change disruption, habitat restoration. Tracing these stories requires that we extend our view into scales much smaller and much larger than the unaided eye can see: the micro-world of the plankton forests that support the food chain, and the macro scale of ocean currents that link Scotland to the open Atlantic and high Arctic.”