Pelagic Species Trait Database

Biological traits are increasingly used to characterize predator-prey interactions within changing ecosystems. When combined, a suite of traits are useful to describe diet selection or prey guilds based on functional role to better predict interactions within ecological communities, especially in the scope of global change. In particular, habitat, behavior, morphology, and nutritional quality are important traits that can affect prey vulnerability across different aspects of the predation process (encounter, attack, capture). Habitat use (e.g., water column position) and migration behaviors impact encounter rates through spatiotemporal overlap, and schooling behavior can deter or facilitate predator attack. Morphological traits such as body shape and physical defenses influence the costs of prey capture, while body size affects consumption for gape-limited predators, and relative eye, fin or appendage size can influence predator detection and evasion. Nutritional quality traits also mediate prey selection since predators select prey items in a manner that maximizes energy gain while minimizing energy expenditure. Nutritional quality varies not only among species but also within species, reflecting geographic, seasonal, interannual, and longer-scale changes in environmental conditions. Understanding how species will interact with one another is important for predicting how ecological systems and services will be altered by forces such as climate change and biological invasions. Trait-based approaches focus on the mechanistic drivers of ecological interactions and are emerging as a useful method for predicting variability in species distributions, community structures, and population dynamics under global change (Green et al. 2022). Further, identifying traits that recur across unrelated prey taxa offer a means to better anticipate predator resource use by simplifying complex foraging dynamics (Hardy et al. accepted). Assembling comprehensive databases of traits for biological communities facilitates ecological modeling of future species abundances, distributions, and food web structures (Green et al. 2022). This database contains traits for adults, juveniles, and larvae of 529 pelagic fish and invertebrate species found worldwide. Traits included describe 1) habitat use and behavior, 2) morphology and morphometrics, 3) nutritional quality (lipid, protein, energy density), and 4) population status information. The database was specifically created for its application in multi-facetted ecological modeling occurring in the California Current system (CCS) located within the NE Pacific Ocean. Therefore, species in the database are primarily from the CCS and broader NE Pacific Ocean to encompass both known prey and potential prey for pelagic predators (Hardy et al. accepted) (given anticipated future shifts in species distributions). Globally important pelagic species known to be consumed by top ocean predators that are found in both the NE Pacific and other ocean basins (NW Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean) are also included to promote the use of trait-based approaches in marine ecosystems and predator populations worldwide. Detailed protocols are provided for trait data collection to serve as a framework for the expansion of this database in the future for other systems and predators. The database is released under a CC-BY-NC license permitting reuse for non-commercial purposes with citation of this database, the data descriptor publication (Gleiber et al. in review) and any original sources, when possible. Users are requested to provide contact information prior to downloading to ensure updated versions are distributed to the user community, as well as enable solicitation of feedback from the community on the database design for user accessibility. New versions of the database will be released as data gaps are filled and values are updated using the methods described above.