Long-term variability in the fish assemblage around Japan over the last century and early warning signals of regime shifts

The marine ecosystems around Japan are very productive and have typical wasp-waist structure dominated by small pelagic fishes such as sardine, exhibiting large low-frequency fluctuations in biomass. Whereas studies on the variability in abundance of individual species such as sardine and anchovy are popular, only a few studies focused on the long-term variability of fish assemblage around Japan. In this study, 13 species/taxa ranging from small forage to large predatory species and from warm- to cold-water species were selected to indicate essential characteristics of the fish assemblage and their drivers were analysed based on fishery, oceanographic and climatic data sets from 1901 to 2018. Results show that two outstanding peaks during the 1930s and 1980s were characterized by abundant sardine. Additionally, species composition showed high similarities during similar temperature regimes while exhibiting contrasts during different temperature regimes. Variations and regime shifts in dominant patterns and fish community indices coincided well with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and regional sea surface temperature (SST). Furthermore, gradient forest analysis identified AMO and regional SSTs as most important predictors of dominant patterns and fish community indices, suggesting that the decadal and multidecadal variability in the fish assemblage around Japan was forced by basin-scale climate variability as inherent in the AMO through its connections with regional SSTs. Autocorrelation coefficient demonstrated that the ecological indicators have the potential to be early warning signals of regime shifts, which suggests the possibility of coming cold regime since around 2015 and has important implications for fisheries management.