The potential climate benefits of seaweed farming in temperate waters.

Seaweed farming is widely promoted as an approach to mitigating climate change despite limited data on carbon removal pathways and uncertainty around benefits and risks at operational scales. We explored the feasibility of climate change mitigation from seaweed farming by constructing five scenarios spanning a range of industry development in coastal British Columbia, Canada, a temperate region identified as highly suitable for seaweed farming. Depending on growth rates and the fate of farmed seaweed, our scenarios sequestered or avoided between 0.

Fish, People, and Systems of Power: Understanding and Disrupting Feedback between Colonialism and Fisheries Science.

AbstractThis essay explores shifting scientific understandings of fish and the evolution of fisheries science, and it grapples with colonialism as a system of power. We trace the rise of fisheries science to a time when Western nation-states were industrializing fishing fleets and competing for access to distant fishing grounds. A theory of fishing called "maximum sustainable yield" (MSY) that understands fish species in aggregate was espoused.

Trophic control of cryptic coralline algal diversity.

Understanding how trophic dynamics drive variation in biodiversity is essential for predicting the outcomes of trophic downgrading across the world's ecosystems. However, assessing the biodiversity of morphologically cryptic lineages can be problematic, yet may be crucial to understanding ecological patterns. Shifts in keystone predation that favor increases in herbivore abundance tend to have negative consequences for the biodiversity of primary producers.

Sudden collapse of a mesopredator reveals its complementary role in mediating rocky reef regime shifts.

While changes in the abundance of keystone predators can have cascading effects resulting in regime shifts, the role of mesopredators in these processes remains underexplored. We conducted annual surveys of rocky reef communities that varied in the recovery of a keystone predator (sea otter, ) and the mass mortality of a mesopredator (sunflower sea star, ) due to an infectious wasting disease. By fitting a population model to empirical data, we show that sea otters had the greatest impact on the mortality of large sea urchins, but that decline corresponded to a 311% increase in medium urchins and a 30% decline in kelp densities.

Sympatric kelp species share a large portion of their surface bacterial communities.

Kelp forest ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots, providing habitat for dense assemblages of marine organisms and nutrients for marine and terrestrial food webs. The surfaces of kelps support diverse microbial communities that facilitate the transfer of carbon from algal primary production to higher trophic levels. We quantified the diversity of bacteria on the surfaces of eight sympatric kelp species from four sites in British Columbia.