Food chain without giants: Modelling the trophic impact of bowhead whaling on little auk populations in the Atlantic Arctic

In the Atlantic Arctic, bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) were nearly exterminated by European whalers between the 17th and 19th centuries. The collapse of the East Greenland-Svalbard-Barents Sea population, from an estimated 50,000 to a few hundred individuals, drastically reduced predation on mesozooplankton. Here, we tested the hypothesis that this event strongly favoured the demography of the little auk (Alle alle), a zooplanktivorous feeder competitor of bowhead whales, and the most abundant seabird in the Arctic. To reconstruct pre-whaling little auk abundance, we modelled trophic niche overlap between the two species using deterministic simulations of mesozooplankton spatial distribution. We estimated a 70% increase in Northeast Atlantic Arctic little auk populations following bowhead whaling, from 2.8 million to 4.8 million breeding pairs. While corresponding to a major population increase, this is far less than predicted by previous studies. Our study illustrates a trophic sh..., , , # **Food chain without giants: Modelling the trophic impact of bowhead whaling on little auk populations in the Atlantic Arctic**

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h9w0vt4rb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h9w0vt4rb)

You will find here the dataset related to the paper \"Food chain without giants: Modelling the trophic impact of bowhead whaling on little auk populations in the Atlantic Arctic\".

This dataset contains **four main files** :

* PCBM_Results_10000rep_2024-05-14.txt : The main output of the model
* sf_surfacewhaleauk_depth : The shapefile of the study area
* coast.txt : A latitude/longitude file to identify coast lines
* Food chain of giants_main script.R : Main script 

## Description of main output dataframe (PCBM\_Results\_10000rep\_2024-05-14.txt)

This dataframe contains the modelling output of each of the 10,000 Monte-Carlo repetitions. Titles are in French, with the following translation for abbreviations :

* eff = number of individuals/breeding couple
* bal = bowhead w...