Mayumi Arimitsu
Forage Fish in Changing Seas
About the Speaker
Whales and other marine predators are sustained by several different species of small pelagic schooling fish (AKA forage fish). With several species of forage fish, each with a different life history strategy, the marine food web hedges its bets against the "boom or bust" population abundance of any one prey species. The persistence of warm water over multiple years during the marine heatwave in 2014-2016 led to low abundance and low nutritional quality of multiple forage fish species at the same time. Dr. Mayumi (Yumi) Arimitsu will discuss evidence for the collapse of multiple forage fish species, and the response of the pelagic marine food web to heatwave conditions in the Gulf of Alaska. Dr. Arimitsu is a Juneau-based research ecologist at USGS Alaska Science Center. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a bachelors in Biology in 1998, and spent her first summer working on ecology of seabirds, forage fish, and oceanography in Kachemak Bay. Over the next few years she worked on projects related to marine fish inventories and predator-prey relationships in Glacier Bay, Sitka, Klondike Gold, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Kenai Fjords National Parks. She completed her masters on Kittlitz's murrelets in 2009, and her PhD on the influence of glaciers on marine ecosystems in 2016 at UAF's School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences in Juneau. More recently Yumi has been monitoring forage fish in coastal areas of the Gulf of Alaska as part of the Gulf Watch Alaska program. She has been working with whale researchers John Moran, Jan Straley, Bree Whitteveen, Chris Gabriele and Janet Nielson on humpback whale prey density and foraging behavior in Alaska.