[Announcer] This conference will now be recorded.

[Heather Tabisola] All right, it's official. Good morning, everybody. And welcome to the spring 2021 EcoFOCI seminar series. I am Heather Tabisola, I'm the co-leader with Jens Nielsen and you should be able to see him up on the screen. If you don't know Jens. This seminar is part of NOAA's EcoFOCI biannual seminar series that is focused on the ecosystems of the North Pacific Ocean, Bering sea, and U.S. Arctic to improve understanding of ecosystem dynamics, and applications of that understanding to the management of living marine resources. Since October 21st, 1986 the seminar has provided an opportunity for research scientists and practitioners to meet, present, and develop their ideas and provoke conversations on subjects pertaining to fisheries, oceanography, or regional issues in Alaska's marine ecosystems. You can visit the EcoFOCI webpage for more information at www.ecofoci.noaa.gov. And thank you, thank you everybody for joining us today as we continue this all virtual series. We've now been at this a year, which is a really crazy thought in itself. And if you'd like to find our speaker lineup we have talks every week for the month of March. They can be found at the OneNOAA seminar series and also on the newest PMEL calendar of events. And I believe they're also now at the AFSC calendar of events. Moving forward, I know today's a special day, it's a Friday, but moving forward, all talks will be on Wednesdays. And if you miss a seminar, we do record them and we will put them up on PMEL's YouTube page. They do take a couple of weeks to get up as Jens and I need to review them and make sure our words are accurate as we meet accessibility standards. So give us a couple of weeks but you are always more than welcome to reach out to the speaker, Jens or myself to get access for when those pop up. Please double check--

[Male on another call interrupts] A change is needed. And the storybook just describes lots of these tools. I'm gonna talk about a few of these tools and give a few illustrations as we go through. David is.

[Heather Tabisola] Mike and Jens, just to let you know I did end up having to mute you there, so just note that. Please double check that your microphones are muted, that you are not using your video unless you are the speaker. And during the conversation today, or the presentation Jens will be monitoring questions in the chat. And we do address those at the end of the talk. But please do feel free to type them into the chat feature. GoToMeeting has changed a little bit. You should see a tab at the top with people icons and right next to that sort of an icon for a thought or chat. And so hopefully you can find that today. I am so, so excited to introduce Dr. Michael Sigler, who is a NOAA retired fishery scientist from Alaska Fisheries Science Center and also Shoals Marine Lab, currently residing in Bend, Oregon. Mike led the NOAA Alaska Fisheres Center habitat and ecological processes research program which included integrated ecosystem research programs in the Bering and Chukchi Seas in ocean acidification research. He retired in August of 2017 and he remains an affiliate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences where he has taught fisheries population dynamics. He has also led Steller sea lion prey and predation studies, the Alaska sablefish stock assessment and the sablefish long line survey. He has over 30 years of research experience in Alaska in the areas of marine ecology and fishery stock assessment. And he also co-teaches a class called integrated ecosystem research and management at the Shoals Marine laboratory and was a Shoals undergraduate research group mentor in 2020. Mike will be, let's see, talking today on how integrated ecosystem research is a powerful tool for understanding the effect of climate change on Alaska's Marine ecosystems. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Mike. And just make sure you unmute cause I did mute you.

[Michael Sigler] There we go. Well, thanks Heather for that. Thanks for having me and listening to me today. So let's see I get it. How I get it's over there. Okay. So I'm gonna talk about climate change in Alaska Marine ecosystems. And a Tale of Two Cities is a story, a Charles Dickens story, of haves and have nots. In Alaska it is a Tale of Two Ecosystems with ice haves and ice have nots. In late winter ice can be very extensive well down into this Southeastern Bering Sea. And then by late summer retreat far to the North. Ice extent in an icy winter can extend past south of the Pribilof islands. 2000 and 2010, I know that's historic a long ago now and quite maybe different, but in March and April you can have up to 60 days of ice cover. Sorry, but I'm actually getting ahead of myself. You can up to 60 days of ice covered to the north and intermittent ice cover to the south. And so in a warmer year, I got ahead of myself, ice extent doesn't go quite as far south. So the area of intermittent ice cover and an area of consistent, at least in the past, ice covering. So the Northern Bering Sea usually is ice covered in late winter. Southeast Bering Sea, sometimes is ice covered. And this is what differentiates the Arctic from the sub-arctic, usually ice cover. From a bigger view higher in space, the Arctic to the north sub-arctic intermittently ice covered or not at all ice covered to the south. With a boundary along 60 degrees north. And I wanted take a step aside for a moment and tell you my perspective as a now retired scientist mostly, kind of. I'm gonna talk about lessons for conducting integrated ecosystem research and understanding climate change effects. I'm not sure who all's on the call but I've done quite a lot of fun stuff when I was active scientist on the trial survey '96 holding my favorite fish in the world, sablefish black cod. Working on St. George Island in 2008, with Fish and Wildlife Service biologists. And resting peacefully in Northern Bering Sea during a coral survey. Pat Malika claims I was sleeping on the job but I think I would just resting while we were transiting between stations. My understanding, I think an understanding of climate effects I view it as a three-legged stool. You monitor the system, you add in directed field work, you add in laboratory work, and you use that together to understand these climate effects on the system, see how the system responds. You use that understanding and typically in models, quantitative usually, sometimes qualitative models to forecast the effects of climate change on the system. So I'll go on to talk about what, how do these differences how does the differences manifest themselves between the Arctic and the sub-arctic. Probably the most prominent differences besides the ice cover is that harvests of fish in the sub-arctic are much greater on average averaging 2.2 million metric tons annual harvest, close to half the total U.S. wild fish capture. In contrast, just to the North, the harvests are typically less than 1000 metric tons annually and they primarily are used as subsistence for coastal communities. But there's a huge several orders of magnitude difference in the annual harvest in off in Alaska waters between the two systems. This reflects differences in the fish abundance a paper by Stevenson and Lauth with many more fish, much higher densities of fish to the south compared to the North. There are other tacit differences between the Arctic and the sub-arctic. I published a couple papers on Zoogeography, for example gray whales Arctic tide to the North in the Arctic. And pilot cod thin and humpback whales to the south. Quite differences in this zoogeography. There's differences in how the sun's energy is taken. It's more often intercepted in the water column by phytoplankton and zooplankton in the subarctic. And instead it's directed much more to the benthic to the benthos in the Arctic. Ice algae occurs both throughout the Arctic system and in the ice algae occurs on the underside of the ice. In spring an important energy source when it falls to the sea floor, following ice melt. And it's a large benthic input. And notably, I worked with Phyllis and Cal Mordy. We published a paper in 2020. We argue and provide evidence that in the shallower Chukchi Sea this ice algae, which can fall below the photic zone in other systems, deeper systems, but the Chukchi is about 45 meters and primary production continues near the sea floor of this ice algae through the summer. In the Southeastern Bearing Sea with a phytoplankton blooms with an early ice retreat, this is a well-known story. If there's early ice retreat, the bloom is delayed until solar stratification occurs which results in mostly small copepods. In contrast with late ice retreat ice associated bloom an earlier bloom primarily results in large Calanus, this is an ice edge effect. And this spatial matching when the ice retreats late. So you have a cold winter with a late ice retreat the large zooplankton they're ice edge affiliated match with the juvenile fish. This effect was first described by Ebett Siddon who I teach with. Yet if there's a warm winter with early ice retreat, there's a spatial mismatch, so plankton still ice affiliated but no longer matching with the juvenile fish. And this favors the abundance of young fish such as pollock. There's a very recent paper by Fiss talks about pollock, large and small zooplankton. There's a recent paper by Jim Thorson, Mayumi Arimitsu and others trying to look at how does these spatial effects manifest for other taxa besides pollock and those species. And they found that the ice edge, the cold pool extent is a widespread effect, affecting many, many taxa and dictating those spatial distributions basically over the last 30 years. We can compare the Chukchi again at another spatial idea. We can compare the Chukchi and Bering Seas as I mentioned the Chukchi is much shallower than the Bering Sea averaging less than 45 meters typically. In contrast the Bering Sea mid-shelf is already at 70 meters. So when ice algae falls to the sea floor you can have continued primary production near the sea floor, but that does not occur the ice algae falls to the sea floor in the ice covered regions of the Bering Sea and that does it does not continue to occur. So this adds another layer of production to the Chukchi Sea above what occurs in the Bering Sea even in the ice covered areas because they have primary production near the sea floor. So we can look at the bloom timing for this ice algae that's fallen to the sea floor and we can compare bloom onset. When does the algae fall to sea floor? And then the bloom continues compared to when the ice retreats there is a statistically significant relationship of it near sea floor ice algae production to ice retreats. So it's, again, it's an ice associated bloom, a bloom, a little term, but of the ice algae continuing to primary produce. And this is that same plot. I'm gonna add a little bit more to it in a moment. So this relationship here between ice retreat and bloom timing index. We can add information from an older paper that Phyllis and I did and others of the Southeastern Bering Sea, actually for the Northern Bering Sea M5 and M8, M2 and M4 down here. I wanna point out these are near bottom moorings in the Chukchi, these are near surface moorings to the South. There's a little bit of an apples and oranges comparison here. Yet we can look for shared relationships. So there's the open water bloom I pointed out before early ice retreat a bloom that occurs with solar stratification. And then we can look at a later bloom. These are all ice associated blooms. And it's well known that the timing of the bloom is affiliated with the ice retreat. It's a well-known relationship. But I think it's pretty cool to see this relationship from the Southeastern Bering Sea the Northern Bering Sea into the Chukchi and it delaying in concert with the ice retreat. It's a pretty neat relationship built on all this mooring data to see. So next, so I talked about the two ecosystems. I'm next gonna talk about the climate change effects. So icy winters, loss of sea ice. Icy winters occur when winds are from the North and Arctic in origin. What's happened recently? There have been years of maybe a gradual decrease but dramatically lower ice in the Bering Sea over these years, these many years. Next course then marine heatwaves. There's been two dramatic heat waves in the last decade. Very extensive. The Blob, Nick Bond's word, and likewise a publication by John Walsh at RL. There has been heat waves in the past, but this last couple have been pretty dramatic. Ocean acidification. So unlike temperature related climate effects which vary interannually or can sometimes vary in stanzas, there is a steady increase. This is a Mauna Loa atmosphere and ocean indices. But there's a steady increase in ocean acidification. There's a seasonal component, but the annual increase is much steadier than the ocean temperature effects. That's one difference with ocean acidification or ocean temperature effects. The other is that, this is an older paper by Dick Feely but it shows this dramatic difference in the saturation depth. In other words, like where are the corrosive wires? How shallow or deep are they? They're much shallower in the Pacific than they are in the Atlantic. That's due to the how the ocean currents carry water and the age of the water. But the calcium carbonate horizons are about a hundred meters compared to something like 1 to 2000 meters in the Atlantic. And the effect on the ecology, on the biological organisms is that many calcified organisms in the North Pacific for example, this is some work that Bob Stone did and others on coral distributions in the Aleutians which are known as this really coral abundant place. Yet many of these corals are in under saturated waters. So they're already dealing somehow with ocean acidification. So I did say those there was four horsemen, but I like this metaphor and analogy so much but there's only really three horsemen of climate change. The next thing in Alaska, the next thing I want to talk about is changes. What has changed due to climate? How have you used those changes in what we observe to make predictions or forecasts? And where did we make mistakes in making those forecasts? And what can we learn from those mistakes? So sea ice is a feeding platform for Pacific walrus. Life is good when there's ice there and then they're above the benthic organisms they prey upon. In contrast, if the ice is out they haul up on the shore. They're much farther from their prey. And work by Chad Jay et al. has shown effects of this loss of sea ice, much lower forging efficiency. Marine heatwaves affect fisheries, a warm , this is essentially Gulf of Alaska, not strictly, but warm is good. Juvenile sablefish going through the roof. In contrast, the well-known story is not really bad for a juvenile Pacific Cod in the Gulf of Alaska. They have affect other taxa, common murres widespread die off here, documented by John Piatt and others, due to the recent heat wave. They talk about why, well common murres eat more than 50% of their own body mass in fish every day. That's a heck of a lot of foraging. When times are good there's lots of fat prey and for them to forage on, chicks survive as do adults. In contrast during the heat wave, prey were fewer, skinnier. There was widespread reproductive failures and adult mortalities of a very long, quite long lived seabird. Predictions. So predictions are based on understanding that three legged stool, as I said that in a cold winter they have the ice edge effect of the good bloom, large copepods are favored. The understanding of this relationship can be used and then producing strong year class of for example, pollock. This understanding can be used to create statistical relationships a well-known paper by Franz Mueter et al. of this temperature of juvenile survival, juvenile pollock is estimates here. And that is used in concert with the population dynamics model to forecast biomass into the future. A slow but steady decline, the forecast a slow but steady decline in pollock biomass. So the important point, the three-legged stool of monitor, understand, and use the understanding to forecast using here a statistical relationship to forecast the effects of climate change. There's a new paper out by Lisa Eisner et al. that goes further in a sense of forecasting using a farther ahead forecast. So you can have a forecast based in now to forecast just three years ahead which for stock assessment and fishery management that immediate thing is a really good thing. But again, it's using understanding of copepods the relationships and using that statistical relationship to estimate three years ahead pollock abundance. It makes Jimmy and Ellie's job easier. Another fish prediction. It's been documented for probably 15 years now that winds affect flatfish recruitment survival for example, northern rock sole. Wind-driven advection blows them into their nursery areas. So you would think that winds in the right direction will help them. However, they are as typical flatfish a density dependent population control. So that with forecasted winds are forecasted to increase with climate change in the right direction. However, the density dependent effects will mitigate that effect so that on average, instead of going up the northern rock sole forecast are predicted, Tom Wilderbuer et al., to remain about the same. Moving on to another warm blooded animal ribbon seal prediction. There's four ice dependent seals. They depend on ice for pupping, nursing, and molting. And this is a qualitative prediction. There's quantitative predictions of ice extent here, what's current and what's forecast. The forecast is for now 40 years ahead for reduced sea ice in this area. The connection to the seal productivity is qualitative. The climate model part is quantitative. But in this review led by Peter Boveng, status review, they stated that the seals, even though there's gonna be reduced ice in their pupping areas or nursing areas that these seals will adjust, at least in part to these changes by shifting breeding locations in response. In other words, they'll move a bit north to respond to reduced ice conditions. But again, they're using understanding to make a prediction about what how climate change will affect this ice dependent species. An ocean acidification example, Red King crab a calcareous organism, is that a heck of a lot of work done at Alaska Fisheries Science Center on in experiments on effects on crab and fish. And for Red King crab in tanks, put the animals in tanks, see how they survive. In this case, juveniles survive to a hundred days clear pH effect, ocean acidification effect. And then they were combined with population models and climate forecast, and ocean conditions. And the prediction is for catch to go to zero by the end of the century. Hopefully that's not the case, but that's the prediction based on the understanding provided in this case by lab experiments for this species and this fishery. So you can have more complicated predictions and ask bigger questions is ecosystem-based fishery management beneficial against climate change effects? And in 2020, there was an estimated total fish population of 19 million metric tons in the Eastern Bering Sea. And that's a lot of fish for sea birds, mammals and people. The allowable biological catch, if you add up all the individual assessments on what they think you can extract from the Bering Sea it comes up to 3.3 million metric tons of fish. And there's a catch cap that caps the total of ecosystem extraction at 2 million metric tons, again from the Eastern Bering Sea, which leaves more prey for seabirds and marine mammals. Still people get a lot to eat but it leaves more prey for other parts of the ecosystem. And Kirstin Holsman and others, they led a paper to try to understand does this cap system, that ecosystem-based fishery management tool, does it have some derived benefit against the effects of climate change? So again, a model with climate scenarios ocean model indices derived from the ocean model Kirstin has a multi-species fish model called CEATTLE which is then tied to a socioeconomic model. They wanted to know if a cap, the 2 million metric ton cap, versus no cap. In other words, for example this year catching 3.3 million metric tons does this ecosystem-based this green control help against the effect of climate change? And they found that, yes, I'm just showing one example of a result. But they found that into the future, in the interval 2025 to 2050, having the cap reduced the chance of a more than 10% decline in catches from 65% to 32%. In other words you're more likely to have some catch stability if you had this cap in place. Eventually it breaks down after 2050, but I would point you to this nice paper to look at those more detailed results. But the big point is that yes, there is a effect to mitigate against climate change based on already in place rules for the Bering Sea fisheries management. So what about mistakes? And what can we learn from mistakes? Warming is good was the original version of the oscillating control hypothesis first published by George Hunt, Phyllis Stabeno and others in 2002. And they explain based on the existing information on why this was true. And they hypothesized that warming would favor zooplankton, no, no classification by size, just zooplankton. And then lead to good fish abundance. We used this original hypothesis to structure the Bering Sea project. It was one of five main hypotheses of that project. And I'm gonna argue that learning occurs through having hypotheses using this structure to work to direct your work, help pull the the whole train goes in the same direction. And that specifically, that hypothesis was that later spring blooms will increase zooplankton production, therefore resulting in increased production abundances of piscivorous fish. Well, it turns out we did the work and there was also intermediate years of study by EcoFOCI and others. And instead, the finding was that warming is bad. And I've already explained and showed that at the beginning of my talk for two reason warming disfavors large zooplankton and this was this not disfavors large zooplankton. And it's not just spring that matters, that over winter survival being fat and happy they should come into winter really does matter. This was revised by Hunt et al. in 2011, based on these results, and the revised oscillating control hypothesis. And our hypothesis also was revised. Instead of increase decrease instead of increase decrease. And in this case, it was through a very large program of course, as most everybody knows, but it is the structury, it's the hypothesis structures our understanding of how the Bering Sea works. And learning occurred through a hypothesis and integrated ecosystem research that very large IERP, the Bering Sea project. So a second point I want to make about integrated ecosystem research is that if we go in the lab, we can collect a data point, lots of data points very quickly. If we do directed field research we can conceivably collect lots of data points very quickly, have good sample sizes. But in understanding climate ecosystem effects each year is a data point. So for example, you know, in the late '90s there was a cold year followed by a warm year, a cold year warm year cold year and a lot of this was the basis for the original oscillating control hypothesis. Then there were several warm years and then during the Bering Sea project several cold years. Since then you've had some variation almost like earlier. My main point though, is that, in trying to understand how does the system respond to climate, each of these years is a point. A cold year you get to see yes, ice associated bloom lots of large zooplankton, lots of pollock that's your one data point. So it takes a lot of time to accrue data for climate understanding, climate ecosystem understanding. So another prediction from the Bering Sea project. So once we did this large IERP, we made a prediction about what will happen to the Northern Bering Sea. So this is what I said we saw in 2001 to 10 on average, nearly always ice covered. And modeling also was used. So this is monitoring to understand the system. This is modeling to help us understand the system and a forecast. So this says the Bering Sea will be still at least have some ice cover into the future during April. But in fact, you know, you guys after I retired experienced some that's something quite different. There's been pretty dramatic drops in ice cover in the last couple, the last few winters, much below the historical envelope, much below the average down in here. And this warming, so warming has occurred much faster than expected, a mistake. And for example, Janet Duffy-Anderson and others tried to understand what were the ecosystem consequences of these changes. And the model still followed the pattern of not having ice associated blooms where there was no ice and farther to the North there was. But in that much of the Bering Sea, those effects occurred throughout the system, again of skinnier, fewer prey, adult mortalities, and reproductive failures, for example for common murres and other species. So an open question is whether fish will move northward? So this is that pattern I show up for me, Ebett's paper, 2013 paper of match and mismatch. So now it's ice more commonly is to the North. And as I understand it, the zooplankton are still the large zooplankton still affiliate with that ice edge. So they're still somewhere in the Bering Sea. So it's an open question, will these fish moved northward to match that? Will they find it will their offspring that happen to be up there by chance, be more successful and that average lead to the fish stocks moving North reproductively? You can look at it a couple of ways. You can use a land study. This is a very nice study by Ben Laurel et al. looking at how does growth vary with temperature for all the four gadid species. And you can use, I think I said growth rate, how growth rate varies with temperature. And you can use this to forecast where you expect fish to be successful and they're likely to occur given forecast of ocean temperatures across, for example, the Bering Sea. We can see from bottom trial surveys that fish are moving North, this is for pollock, but also I understand it's true for cod. A widespread bottom trial survey in 2010 pollock were on the outer shelf, shelf break. And in 2017 they were also found to the North, but not in 2010. We can try to wonder so if cod also did the same thing now they've moved North a warmer year, they're up here. What are they gonna do when the ice returns? I just saw a talk by Julie Nielsen, a study with her and Susanne McDermott and others of tagged Pacific Cod with pop-up archival tags with light sensors. So you can infer where they're located. Will these fish appear? Will they move South again as ice comes or will they stay up here? What's the pattern? So we're trying to use a directed field, they're trying to use a directed field study to understand this effective climate. And they estimated the probable locations of 24 tags. They were first tagged around St. Lawrence Island. So summer, where are they gonna go? So as the fall came on they spread out at least, And as ice formed and then moved South, they've seen that the Cod are moving in front of the ice. They're responding to the temperature, the temperature, the ice cover. Into February now they're on the outer shelf where they would usually spawn. And then as the spring came, and ice diminishes it looks like they've returned back North. The numbers are much smaller. And Julie and Susanne asked me to say this is a preliminary result. But they did, it's cool. It's a directed field study that lets us understand what is the response of cod to climate change and how does it respond to a more specific question about ice extent? So to conclude, I would argue in this case trying to understand fish moving northward and also how do other taxa respond seabirds, ice seals and so forth as you are already doing monitoring the system the environmental conditions, as well as the fishing crab species that are there. Directed lab studies, directed fieldwork like Ben's study, directed field work like Susanne and Julie's study monitoring. And if they're tied together, like you typically do that's integrated ecosystem research that can be used as you are doing to understand climate effects in the system, understanding what's happening now how to manage the fisheries in response how to manage bird seabirds and marine mammals in response and also forecast what's gonna happen. So I have take homes on the Alaska marine ecosystem side. Ice is king. Warming is occurring. And there are as you all know, there are broad ecosystem effects. My specific points to me that I'm adding in some cases on integrated ecosystem research we can understand climate effects through a three-legged stool of monitor, understand, and then forecast. That learning occurs through hypotheses and making predictions. And sometimes mistakes, and still learning from that. And in understanding climate ecosystem effects one year is one data point. And last I'd say, if you're an undergraduate come and take our class with myself, Ebett Siddon, and Jenn Seavey and Chris Siddon. Thanks for listening.

[Heather Tabisola] Thank you, Mike. That's a good talk. You encapsulate so much of the work so very well.

[Michael Sigler] Thanks Heather.

[Heather Tabisola] Folks, if you would like we can do questions in chat. I know a lot of you haven't seen Mike in a while so maybe you want to jump on camera and just let me know that you have a question and I can run through names and you can ask him directly. I feel like everybody at this point is used to Zoom. So it's not such a gamble like we had a year ago. Sorry, I'm just switching up my views here. So if folks do have questions, please go ahead and put them in the chat. We do have about 10, 12 minutes until 11, and obviously if folks need to go, you can go. Libby has a question, Libby's question. I have heard some propose that climate change is happening so fast that EBM or ecosystem based management can't make a difference. What are your thoughts on that Mike?

[Michael Sigler] So fast that EBM cannot make a difference. Well, I certainly wouldn't use it as a tool to say I'm trying to stop the effects of climate change. But I think that Kirstin et al.'s paper would argue otherwise. But I think that effect stops, and, well not stops, not so black and white, goes away in 30 years I think there's certainly room for more studies to test that under different conditions. That was a three species test. I think it doesn't necessarily apply to the Gulf of Alaska where there is no cap. There are buffers on spaced and single species, but there's no multi-species buffer in the catch quota system. So that's a pretty dramatic drop from the total quotas of one-third top off the top in the Bering Sea. And I also don't think it, I think you could be true in the sense that that's ecosystem based management for directed at fish. It will help the seabirds and the marine mammals but it's not explicitly helping this other species that Fish and Wildlife and Marine Fisheries know it manages. So I'd say it's a bit of a yes you're right. No, you're wrong but yes, you're right.

[Heater Tabisola] Let's see Jim Overland asks, is the effect of the cap due to that it's fixed rather than year to year variable, or other effect?

[Michael Sigler] I think it's mostly because it's fixed and because... So there's a spot you can't go above and it's quite a bit both below what the quotas typically add up to be. That's why it's a significant cap. Unlike the Gulf of Alaska where the cap is actually there's a 700, it's quite different. So I think if they're, yeah, I think that's good enough to say for that. Yeah.

[Heather Tabisola] All right. Just some comments as well. Jane [microphone cuts out], thanks Mike great presentation and synthesis. And Roger was here, Roger Griffith says, so good to hear and see you, Mike, thanks for the--

[Michael Sigler] Thanks Roger.

And I miss your wisdom and great ability to communicate the complexities and importance of integrated ecosystem research. Thanks for all you did and are doing help us advance, missing you. I'm sure you could read that too, but.

[Michael Sigler] Thanks Roger, I appreciate it.

[Heather Tabisola] Okay. Roger says, if you had limited funds and could only advance one leg of the stool which one would you put it on for biggest bang for the buck to advance climate ready LRM management?

[Michael Sigler] I don't like questions like that because I appreciate what Roger is trying to do. But I think it's more a question of what region you prioritize and how you do it. For example, when I was, not much before I was retiring, within the recruitment processes alliance, we had a lot of discussion of how to keep some monitoring on the Eastern Bering Sea and yet take care of the Gulf of Alaska. And there was a kind of a full monty approach, a full fledged approach in the Bering Sea going on and we had some discussion could you reduce that down to less to try to take some of the asset and put it into the Bering Sea into the Gulf of Alaska? And I think that's a more productive way to think about it. Can we still, once we understand the system can we reduce our effort there and move on to another system? And I guess a corollary to that would be that you would often, we're gonna make sure we have enough money into a spot to understand it well sort of like a directed IERP. And then we're gonna back off once we spend three to five years in that system and then do some monitoring because one data point is one year for climate ecosystem effects and then move on to the next region for our IERP.

[Heather Tabisola] Martin, Martin Dorn is here and he says what do you think about using a dynamic cap to deal with changing productivity due to climate change?

[Michael Sigler] Yeah, along Jim's question. I think that's possible. I think those are kind of like those are modeling questions. I think that, which I don't have a particular insight. I think like the stuff that Kirstin did, you apply that same approach to other systems, the Gulf of Alaska or whatnot, to try to see if you get that how that'll work and test the system. I think to go a little bit back to Jim's question. I think the cap of the Bering Sea is worth it because it's been so much below what the total addition of individual species allowable catches would be. And if you want it in the Gulf of Alaska, there's none. So you would use modeling like Kirstin's modeling to answer Mark's question, to try to understand can we catch somewhat more? Could we go to 2.5 million metric tons or could we have a dynamic in the Bering Sea and include more catch? I would also though, I think, you know we need to make sure we explicitly do more to make sure there's enough food for the mammals and the seabirds. There's a great paper by Cury et al. and seabirds leave one-third for the birds. And there should be in these considerations of models which I think is the best tool, we want to make sure that we consider the other parts of the ecosystem not just the fishermen and the food that we bring back to our tables.

[Heather Tabisola] Other questions from folks? I'll ask, oh, wait, here's one. Oh, thanks Jens. Okay, Jens' question. Your hypothesis for the Bering suggests warming, less ice later bloom leads to decreased conditions for higher trophic level species, large zooplankton, et cetera. How does that fit with suggestions that higher net primary productivity derived from satellite studies Brown and Enrico and in C2 studies will increase with warming temperatures?

[Michael Sigler] Right. So that's kind of like a Ken Coyle question. So, you know, Ken in his work on the oscillating control hypothesis, he specialized in how intermediate, I think it's a 2011 paper, how intermediate steps can suck up some of that primary production. And so it might not always go to the fish. It might get trapped in a lower part of the trophic web and it's not necessarily gonna go and benefit the fish, birds and mammals, the upper trophic levels like ourselves. So I think understanding those intermediate steps are important to you know, answering the question that Jens is asking.

[Heather Tabisola] Other questions from folks? Jens says, thank you. Okay. And agrees. All right, Calvin, Calvin Mordy asks recent models also suggest a decline in nutrients over the shelf in the coming decades. Oh, Calvin's apparently commenting. I thought it was a question.

[Michael Sigler] Okay.

[Heather Tabisola] Okay. Any other questions from folks? We do have a couple more minutes. I was going to say, Mike, since you gave this talk to Iola Shoals, which is obviously at least the class that you do with an undergraduate and all I noticed all of the examples that you used in this presentation are conglomerates of so many different people, who like we know within RPA the recruitment process alliance within EcoFOCI, partners. Is there any, like have the students ever picked up on this? Do you have suggestions to them on how, you know integrated ecosystem research works and the the large groups of people that you get to work with or have to work with to make this happen? Do you address that at all with them or sage advice for those who are here, just how to work in those kind of groups and how to make it happen?

[Michael Sigler] So I'm talking to professionals like yourself now, or students like at Shoals?

[Heather Tabisola] You pick, you can do both. [Laughs]

[Michael Sigler] I think for professionals, it's collaborating outside your discipline, still maintaining your expertise in your discipline, but reaching out to people in other parts of the system and working with them. In my best example, I always go back to, Vernon Bird who was a Fish and Wildlife Service seabird biologist he published a paper just on seabirds and then used ocean conditions nearby. And it was a nice paper, but it didn't really use all the information around the seabird colonies and Pribilofs to answer his questions. The Bering Sea project we provided that expertise, you know, fish biologists, and physical oceanographers to explain what was going on with seabirds on these islands. So there was power through this collaboration. With the students, Ebett and I, we try to focus on explaining to them in a similar way about how you want to reach out to. Actually a way I've talked about it. A lot of times the student will come to me and say I'm a seabird biologist, and I'll go, well why don't you just say you're a marine ecologist who wants to focus on seabirds. Because you're in a better spot, if you're trying to understand why seabirds aren't doing well on an island, or what's going on in the whole system. So you're trying to look at the ecology of the system from a bigger picture. You can focus on your seabirds, but you're trying think about it from a broader perspective. I'm a seabird, I wanna go eat, where am I gonna go? I'm going to lay my eggs, where am I gonna go? What are the conditions there and so forth. So think of yourself for the students more as a marine ecologist. And just like my word advice to professionals, collaborate and collaborate, work, reach out to other people. You're gonna gain a huge amount in your discussion parts of your paper you're gonna add a lot to the discussion part of your paper, unless it's a pretty narrow paper, if you have other people that are in other disciplines that you're collaborating with.

[Heather Tabisola] Thanks for that. I always find that EcoFOCI is a good indicator of what collaborations should be in RPA in the Alaska Bering group and...

[Michael Sigler] The IRPs were great for, I think adding to the collaborations that were already in AFSC. I think they've made a huge, and you guys it's really cool. Like I said, sort of offline, it's really cool to see all the work that's being done in the last five years considering how much is changing in these systems.

[Heather Tabisola] Yeah. Alex was here and he said in Alexandra is, and he said enjoyed your presentation. Thanks Mike. Mary Beth Decker. Great point, Mike, about collaborating, enjoyed your talk. Dianne Poster was here, she said great presentation. Thank you. And Ben says, hey Mike, how about those sablefish? [Laughs]

[Michael Sigler] Yes! Yeah. I've been teased by Dana Hanselman about my predictions for sablefish stock assessment back when I was doing it. And he claims he does much better. I think he just lucked out by having a bunch of really good year classes. I'll add before everybody gets up. Anybody have any questions feel free to contact me and we can chat. And say hello too.

[Heather Tabisola] It is 11. Please make sure to say hi to Mike if you'd like to. Again, we did record this presentation. It does take a couple of weeks to go up on YouTube. So don't expect it too soon, but if you'd like to see it sooner, I can oftentimes share a link if you have an immediate need for that. And again, we are here starting next week on Wednesdays through the end of the month. So thank you everybody for being here and I'm going to stop recording and then...