Understanding the response of the Western Mediterranean cephalopods to environment and fishing in a context of alleged winners of change

13 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, supplementary data https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marenvres.2024.106478.-- Data availability: The authors do not have permission to share data

Increasing impacts of both fisheries and climate change have resulted in shifts in the structure and functioning of marine communities. One recurrent observation is the rise of cephalopods as fish recede. This is generally attributed to the removal of main predators and competitors by fishing, while mechanistic evidence is still lacking. In addition, climate change may influence cephalopods due to their high environmental sensitivity. We aim to unveil the effects of different anthropogenic and environmental drivers at different scales focusing on the cephalopod community of the Western Mediterranean Sea. We investigate several ecological indicators offering a wide range of information about their ecology, and statistically relating them with environmental, biotic and fisheries drivers. Our results highlight non-linear changes of indicators along with spatial differences in their responses. Overall, the environment drivers have greater effects than biotic and local human impacts with contrasting effects of temperature across the geographic gradient. We conclude that cephalopods may be impacted by climate change in the future while not necessary through positive warming influence, which should make us cautious when referring to them as generalized winners of current changes

This study was partially funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 817578 (TRIATLAS), No 869300 (FutureMARES) and No 101059823 (B-USEFUL). C. Veloy's contribution was supported by a PhD fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU18/05594) and the University of Barcelona. This work acknowledges the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX 2019-000928-S). MH and MC also acknowledge support from the COCOCHA project (PID 2019-110282RA-I00, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation)

Peer reviewed