Author(s): Guerreiro, Miguel
Date: 2024
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/99452
Origin: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
Subject(s): Biogeography; Decapodiforms; Climate Change; Species Distribution Models; Southern Ocean; Biogeografia; Decapodiformes; Alterações Climática; Modelos de Distribuição de Espécies; Oceano Antárctico
Cephalopods have been hypothesized as winners of Climate change. This thesis tackles this hypothesis by studying the future trends of decapodiform cephalopod biogeography under climate change, using species distribution models. Specifically, in Chapter 2 we projected the distributions of the most harvested squids into 2100 and 2050, and revealed a trend of decreasing habitat availability, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. In Chapter 3, we showed that the cuttlefish habitat availability decreased in overall, especially around the lower latitudes. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, we focused on squid from the Southern Ocean, and also showed habitat loss, with emphasis on squid living close to the Antarctic continent. Finally, in Chapter 5, we projected for the pelagic Southern Ocean, the distribution of squid, fish and krill into the future, as well as their air-breathing predators, and applied network analysis, to study the future trends of the food web and the foraging grounds of the top predators. The results showed that the ecosystem will be pushed south against the continent, prey species will be more latitudinally segregated, and the food web will become on average less connected, with predators having to perform longer trips to faraway diminishing foraging grounds. Summing up, this thesis shows that decapodiform cephalopods will be negatively affected by climate change, which will dictate severe consequences to both the marine ecosystems and the human societies that dependent on them.
