Dataset Information

Has eutrophication promoted forage fish production in the Baltic Sea?

ABSTRACT: Reducing anthropogenic nutrient inputs is a major policy goal for restoring good environmental status of coastal marine ecosystems. However, it is unclear to what extent reducing nutrients would also lower fish production and fisheries yields. Empirical examples of changes in nutrient loads and concurrent fish production can provide useful insights to this question. In this paper, we investigate to what extent a multi-fold increase in nutrient loads from the 1950s to 1980s enhanced forage fish production in the Baltic Sea. We use monitoring data on fish stock dynamics covering the period of the nutrient increase, combined with nutrient concentrations from a 3-dimensional coupled physical-biogeochemical ocean model. The results suggest that nutrient enrichment enhanced the biomass level of forage fish by up to 50 % in some years and areas due to increased body weight of fish. However, the trends in fish biomasses were generally decoupled from changes in nutrient concentrations.

SUBMITTER: Eero M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5013000 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Has eutrophication promoted forage fish production in the Baltic Sea?

Eero Margit M Andersson Helén C HC Almroth-Rosell Elin E MacKenzie Brian R BR

Ambio 20160512 6

Reducing anthropogenic nutrient inputs is a major policy goal for restoring good environmental status of coastal marine ecosystems. However, it is unclear to what extent reducing nutrients would also lower fish production and fisheries yields. Empirical examples of changes in nutrient loads and concurrent fish production can provide useful insights to this question. In this paper, we investigate to what extent a multi-fold increase in nutrient loads from the 1950s to 1980s enhanced forage fish p ...[more]

PMID: 27170013

Similar Datasets

Project description:Our previous studies showed that particular antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) were enriched locally in sediments below fish farms in the Northern Baltic Sea, Finland, even when the selection pressure from antibiotics was negligible. We assumed that a constant influx of farmed fish feces could be the plausible source of the ARGs enriched in the farm sediments. In the present study, we analyzed the composition of the antibiotic resistome from the intestinal contents of 20 fish from the Baltic Sea farms. We used a high-throughput method, WaferGen qPCR array with 364 primer sets to detect and quantify ARGs, mobile genetic elements (MGE), and the 16S rRNA gene. Despite a considerably wide selection of qPCR primer sets, only 28 genes were detected in the intestinal contents. The detected genes were ARGs encoding resistance to sulfonamide (sul1), trimethoprim (dfrA1), tetracycline [tet(32), tetM, tetO, tetW], aminoglycoside (aadA1, aadA2), chloramphenicol (catA1), and efflux-pumps resistance genes (emrB, matA, mefA, msrA). The detected genes also included class 1 integron-associated genes (intI1, qacEΔ1) and transposases (tnpA). Importantly, most of the detected genes were the same genes enriched in the farm sediments. This preliminary study suggests that feces from farmed fish contribute to the ARG enrichment in farm sediments despite the lack of contemporaneous antibiotic treatments at the farms. We observed that the intestinal contents of individual farmed fish had their own resistome compositions. Our result also showed that the total relative abundances of transposases and tet genes were significantly correlated (p = 0.001, R2 = 0.71). In addition, we analyzed the mucosal skin and gill filament resistomes of the farmed fish but only one multidrug-efflux resistance gene (emrB) was detected. To our knowledge, this is the first study reporting the resistome of farmed fish using a culture-independent method. Determining the possible sources of ARGs, especially mobilized ARGs, is essential for controlling the occurrence and spread of ARGs at fish farming facilities and for lowering the risk of ARG spread from the farms to surrounding environments.

Dataset Information

Has eutrophication promoted forage fish production in the Baltic Sea?

Publications

Has eutrophication promoted forage fish production in the Baltic Sea?

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets