Highly active fish in low oxygen environments: vertical movements and behavioural responses of bigeye and yellowfin tunas to oxygen minimum zones in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Unlabelled: Oxygen minimum zones in the open ocean are predicted to significantly increase in volume over the coming decades as a result of anthropogenic climatic warming. The resulting reduction in dissolved oxygen (DO) in the pelagic realm is likely to have detrimental impacts on water-breathing organisms, particularly those with higher metabolic rates, such as billfish, tunas, and sharks. However, little is known about how free-living fish respond to low DO environments, and therefore, the effect increasing OMZs will have cannot be predicted reliably. Here, we compare the responses of two active predators (bigeye tuna and yellowfin tuna ) to DO at depth throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean. Using time-series data from 267 tagged tunas (59,910 days) and 3D maps of modelled DO, we find that yellowfin tuna respond to low DO at depth by spending more time in shallower, more oxygenated waters. By contrast, bigeye tuna, which forage at deeper depths well below the thermocline, show fewer changes in their use of the water column. However, we find that bigeye tuna increased the frequency of brief upward vertical excursions they performed by four times when DO at depth was lower, but with no concomitant significant difference in temperature, suggesting that this behaviour is driven in part by the need to re-oxygenate following time spent in hypoxic waters. These findings suggest that increasing OMZs will impact the behaviour of these commercially important species, and it is therefore likely that other water-breathing predators with higher metabolic rates will face similar pressures. A more comprehensive understanding of the effect of shoaling OMZs on pelagic fish vertical habitat use, which may increase their vulnerability to surface fisheries, will be important to obtain if these effects are to be mitigated by future management actions.

Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00227-023-04366-2.