REEM Program Represented at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium
Figure 3. The relative ration of walleye pollock as measured from prey weights in pollock stomach contents, for four major prey types from May-September, combining all years 1982-2008.
Kerim Aydin attended the North Pacific Research Board's Alaska Marine Science Symposium, 18-22 January in Anchorage, Alaska, where he presented a talk titled "A web for all seasons: an analysis of 30 years of seasonal and geographic variability in marine food webs through fish food habits and stable isotope analyses."
The talk summarized a substantial portion of the data collected by the REEM Program since 1982 and focused on the biogeography of predator feeding in the Bering Sea. Highlighted were the diets of walleye pollock, which consume up to 60% of the secondary production in the Bering Sea annually and thus are a keystone predator.
The patterns of their prey over time show oceanic domains, for example, with copepods dominating pollock diets on the outer Bering Sea shelf, euphausiids dominating the inner shelf and southern portion of the Bering Sea, and amphipods being a primary prey associated with the Bering Sea Cold Pool (Fig. 3 above).
