Spatial–temporal scales of synchrony in marine zooplankton biomass and abundance patterns: A world-wide comparison

Abstract Large scale synchrony in the fluctuations of abundance or biomass of marine fish populations in regions on opposite sides of an ocean basin or in different oceans have been viewed as externally forced by correlated environmental stochasticity (e.g., common external forcing), most often as atmospheric teleconnections of basin-to-global scale atmospheric forcing, such as the Arctic Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Specific causal mechanisms have been difficult to unequivocally discover, but possible mechanisms include influences on habitat temperatures, productivity operating through bottom-up (trophodynamic) mechanisms or direct climate influence on the fish populations (top-down mechanisms). For small pelagic fishes (sardines and anchovies) in widely separated large marine ecosystems that lack obvious ocean interconnectivity, it has been argued that the teleconnections may be atmospheric, acting on the fishes directly and propagating to the ecosystem from the middle out (wasp-waist species). Zooplankton biomass or abundance time series data from >100 sites world-wide are used to examine the spatial scales of coherent temporal synchrony. If spatially correlated environmental factors (like climate) are important for creating synchrony in fish populations via bottom-up effects (trophic interactions involving fish prey, e.g., zooplankton), then we would expect to observe synchrony in fluctuations of zooplankton biomass/numbers at spatial scales similar to those found for fish species. Zooplankton biomass/abundance have 50% spatial decorrelation scales of ca. 700–1400 km and scales of significant coherence that extend to separation distances of ca. 3000 km. These are also the spatial scales of environmental (sea surface temperature) synchrony from our global analysis. These scales are slightly greater than the 50% decorrelation scales of ca. 150–700 km for recruitment synchrony in Atlantic marine fish and survival and recruitment synchrony of Northeast Pacific salmonids (150–1000 km depending on species). However, the spatial scales of synchrony of annual zooplankton biomass anomalies in the Humboldt Current, California Current and Kuroshio ecosystems of the Pacific are much too small (ca. 2000 km) to be directly causal of the basin-scale (7000–15,000 km) synchrony exhibited by sardine and/or anchovy populations in those ecosystems.