Class Year

2025

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Spring 2025

Department 1

Environmental Studies

Abstract

Effective fisheries management is increasingly challenged by climate-driven shifts in species distribution and by a lack of data on early life stages of key forage fish species. In the Gulf of Maine, Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), a once economically dominant fishery species and a key prey species for many dependent predators, has declined due to poor early-stage recruitment and warming waters. Despite this decline, current trawl surveys do not inform early-stage Atlantic herring distribution due to mesh size limitations, leaving critical gaps in our knowledge. To address this knowledge gap, I used common terns (Sterna hirundo) as bioindicators for early-stage Atlantic herring habitat by combining movement and diet data for terns from two breeding colonies (Petit Manan Island and Ship Island) in the Gulf of Maine. I found that environmental variables such as sea surface temperature (SST), chlorophyll concentration, and distance from colony were significant predictors of Atlantic herring presence, with common terns foraging for Atlantic herring in cooler, higher productivity, and farther offshore waters as compared to other prey. Sea surface temperatures above 15℃ marked a strong threshold beyond which Atlantic herring were not present, alluding to future declines under continued warming. Common terns also demonstrated a willingness to travel farther to access Atlantic herring, a preferred prey species, which could result in higher foraging costs as herring stocks move more offshore due to warming. My findings show that the integration of seabird-based data into fishery monitoring programs can complement other data collection efforts on fisheries stocks. Future work should explore scaling this approach across species and regions to support ecosystem-based management under climate change.

Comments

Written for ES 460: Individualized Study - Research

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

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