what happened to gray whales during the pleistocene the ecological impact of sea-level change on benthic feeding areas in the north pacific ocean发生了什么灰色鲸鱼在更新世海平面变化对底栖生物的生态影响喂养在北太平洋地区.pdfVIP

What Happened to Gray Whales during the Pleistocene? The Ecological Impact of Sea-Level Change on Benthic Feeding Areas in the North Pacific Ocean Nicholas D. Pyenson1,2*, David R. Lindberg3 1 Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., United States of America, 2 Departments of Mammalogy and Paleontology, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America, 3 Department of Integrative Biology, Center for Computational Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America Abstract Background: Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) undertake long migrations, from Baja California to Alaska, to feed on seasonally productive benthos of the Bering and Chukchi seas. The invertebrates that form their primary prey are restricted to shallow water environments, but global sea-level changes during the Pleistocene eliminated or reduced this critical habitat multiple times. Because the fossil record of gray whales is coincident with the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, gray whales survived these massive changes to their feeding habitat, but it is unclear how. Methodology/Principal Findings: We reconstructed gray whale carrying capacity fluctuations during the past 120,000 years by quantifying gray whale feeding habitat availability using bathymetric data for the North Pacific Ocean, constrained by their maximum diving depth. We calculated carrying capacity based on modern estimates of metabolic demand, prey availability, and feeding duration; we also constrained our estimates to reflect current population size and account for glaciated and non-glaciated areas in the North Pacific. Our results show that key feeding areas eliminated