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International audience; Populations of fishes provide valuable services for billions of people, but face diverse and interacting threats that jeopardize their sustainability. Human population growth and intensifying resource use for food, water, energy and goods are compromising fish populations through a variety of mechanisms, including overfishing, habitat degradation and declines in water quality. The important challenges raised by these issues have been recognized and have led to considerable advances over past decades in managing and mitigating threats to fishes worldwide. In this review, we identify the major threats faced by fish populations alongside recent advances that are helping to address these issues. There are very significant efforts worldwide directed towards ensuring a sustainable future for the world’s fishes and fisheries and those who rely on them. Although considerable challenges remain, by drawing attention to successful mitigation of threats to fish and fisheries we hope to provide the encouragement and direction that will allow these challenges to be overcome in the future

An ecomorphological method was developed, with a focus on predation functions, to define functional groups in the Celtic Sea fish community. Eleven functional traits, measured for 930 individuals from 33 species, led to 11 functional groups. Membership of functional groups was linked to body size and taxonomy. For seven species, there were ontogenetic changes in group membership. When diet composition, expressed as the proportions of different prey types recorded in stomachs, was compared among functional groups, morphology-based predictions accounted for 28-56% of the interindividual variance in prey type. This was larger than the 12-24% of variance that could be explained solely on the basis of body size. (C) 2013 The Fisheries Society of the British Isles

Trophic information—who eats whom—and species' body sizes are two of the most basic descriptions necessary to understand community structure as well as ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Consumer–resource body size ratios between predators and their prey, and parasitoids and their hosts, have recently gained increasing attention due to their important implications for species' interaction strengths and dynamical population stability. This data set documents body sizes of consumers and their resources. We gathered body size data for the food webs of Skipwith Pond, a parasitoid community of grass-feeding chalcid wasps in British grasslands; the pelagic community of the Benguela system, a source web based on broom in the United Kingdom; Broadstone Stream, UK; the Grand Cariçaie marsh at Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Tuesday Lake, USA; alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada of California; Mill Stream, UK; and the eastern Weddell Sea Shelf, Antarctica. Further consumer–resource body size data are included for planktonic predators, predatory nematodes, parasitoids, marine fish predators, freshwater invertebrates, Australian terrestrial consumers, and aphid parasitoids. Containing 16 807 records, this is the largest data set ever compiled for body sizes of consumers and their resources. In addition to body sizes, the data set includes information on consumer and resource taxonomy, the geographic location of the study, the habitat studied, the type of the feeding interaction (e.g., predacious, parasitic) and the metabolic categories of the species (e.g., invertebrate, ectotherm vertebrate). The present data set was gathered with the intent to stimulate research on effects of consumer–resource body size patterns on food-web structure, interaction-strength distributions, population dynamics, and community stability. The use of a common data set may facilitate cross-study comparisons and understanding of the relationships between different scientific approaches and models.

We explored changes in western Mediterranean fishery and aquaculture landings using trophic level (TL) estimates derived from nitrogen stable isotope analysis combined with geographically detailed fishery data collated by the General Fisheries Council for the Mediterranean (GFCM). Our analyses confirmed earlier suggestions that there has been a significant decline in the mean trophic level of Mediterranean landings (by _ 0.15 TL over 26 years). However, this decline is suggested to be almost entirely a result of increased landings of bivalve molluscs from mariculture and not due to changes in landings from capture fisheries. The mean trophic level of finfish landings has not changed significantly since 1973, although both fish and total landings have become significantly more diverse. Inspection of small pelagic fish landings revealed a marked decrease in the contribution played by anchovy and replacement of this species by sardine. Since 1981, cage culture of high trophic level species such as sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) and seabream (Sparus aurata) has become increasingly important, such that when clupeoid landings were excluded from the analyses, the mean trophic level of finfish landings was actually demonstrated to have increased over the past 26 years.

11 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, Fishes and invertebrates were collected from the continental slope southwest of the Balearic Islands, Mediterranean, in October 1996 and May 1998 from 3 faunally-distinct depth zones: 200 to 800 m (upper slope), 800 to 1425 m (middle slope) and 1425 to 1800 m (lower slope). Differences in δ15N and δ13C between October 1996 and May 1998 were observed only in the crustaceans Aristeus antennatus and Nematocarcinus exilis. There were few differences among depths in δ15N or δ13C of benthic fishes or crustaceans: the shrimps A. antennatus and Acanthephyra eximia showed higher δ15N values at greater depth, and δ13C values of the fishes Alepocephalus rostratus (Alepocephalidae) and Coelorhynchus coelorhynchus (Macrouridae) also tended to increase with increasing depth. Differences in plankton and suprabenthos were also observed among zones (at depth, greater δ15N values of gelatinous plankton, calanoid copepods and peracarids were recorded, along with smaller δ13C values of gelatinous plankton and peracarids). These are attributed to a microbially-mediated increase in δ15N and a reduction in δ13C of the particulate material remaining after preferential utilization of labile organic matter in the stable and relatively high (13°C) temperature of the Mediterranean water column. Strong positive correlations between δ15N and δ13C data for plankton, fishes and crustaceans indicated a single primary source material for these communities, which is attributed to marine snow