Commercial fishing amplifies impacts of increasing temperature on predator-prey interactions in marine ecosystems

Predator-prey interactions determine food web structure, energy flux, and ecosystem stability. Increasing temperatures and commercial fishing both alter body size distributions that underpin predator-prey interactions, but empirical evidence of their individual and combined effects is limited. We study how the predator to prey body mass ratio (PPMR) changes as a function of temperature and fishing effort in over 50,000 predator stomachs collected across the Northeast Atlantic over 35 years. PPMR increases with temperature, an effect that is exacerbated by greater fishing effort, driven by intraspecific decreases in prey body mass in heavily fished areas. To compensate for smaller prey (both within and across species) in warmer waters and areas of high fishing, predators target the largest prey available to them, but this is insufficient to alter the community-wide increase in PPMR. Higher PPMR is associated with weaker trophic interactions that dampen strong oscillatory dynamics but could also reduce energy transfer efficiency within ecosystems, both of which can affect ecosystem stability. These results could help underpin ecosystem-based management and sustainable fisheries by providing estimates of how future climate warming might interact with fishing to affect energy flux through marine food webs. This study shows how commercial fishing and increasing temperatures impact predator-to-prey body mass ratios (PPMR) in the Northeast Atlantic. Authors identify an increase in PPMR that may weaken ecosystem stability, giving insight for sustainable fisheries management under future climate warming.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2026-01-19

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-67362-8PMID 41554695PMCID 12815960
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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