In the Pacific Ocean, air and ocean temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide, landings of anchovies and sardines, and the productivity of coastal and open ocean ecosystems have varied over periods of about 50 years. In the mid-1970s, the Pacific changed from a cool “anchovy regime” to a warm “sardine regime.” A shift back to an anchovy regime occurred in the middle to late 1990s. These large-scale, naturally occurring variations must be taken into account when considering human-induced climate change and the management of ocean living resources.
Ocean /atmosphere perturbations that generate large-scale thermal anomalies in the Pacific are natural processes that cause significant variability in living resources. Analysis of the 1982–83 El Niño indicates that depression of the nutricline set in motion a decrease in productivity that eventually affected survival and reproduction at higher trophic levels. This impact, together with large-scale southward redistributions, accounted for most of the observed changes in the abundance of living resources.