Fishers’ local ecological knowledge (LEK) reveals complex food web dynamics for rapidly warming waters in Maine (USA) coastal systemsEcosystem Services

Benjamin Neal¹, Loren McClenachan¹, Marissa McMahan², Ellie Batchelder¹, Neida Villanueva-Galarza³, Jonathan Grabowski³

¹University of Victoria, Canada - ²Manomet Conservation Sciences, USA - ³Northeastern University, USA

Local ecological knowledge (LEK) can provide insight into ecosystem change in temperate hard-bottom systems, particularly in contexts with rapidly changing ecological dynamics. In New England (USA) lobster fisheries, rapidly warming waters have demonstrated the potential to disrupt food webs, as new species move in, and altered phenologies disrupt species interactions and reproduction. Here, we use interviews with lobster fishers in Maine and Massachusetts to understand lobster fishers’ LEK of dynamic food webs and take a mental modeling approach to construct LEK food web models under conditions of rapidly warming coastal temperate waters. We find that fishers are observing a wide range of ecological interactions across habitats. Collectively, they report knowledge of >40 species ranging from terrestrial species like mink, to deep sea species like redfish. Our mental-model food-webs demonstrate perceptions that warming water is having impacts throughout the food web, with most interactions resulting in negative impacts on lobster. Fishers also report knowledge of complex interactions, including predation, competition, and habitat loss, as well as lobster’s interactions with different predators across life stages. Finally, we identify and categorize four main ways of knowing that contribute to fishers’ LEK, including direct and indirect observation, word of mouth, and inference. Our findings demonstrate that active fishers in temperate reef systems have complex understandings of food web interactions in dynamic ecosystems that are changing rapidly due to climate change, which can be an invaluable source of knowledge for developing conservation and management strategies for these systems, and that this information can be gathered through community collaboration, which also functions to build trust and contribute to better outcomes in an era of declining fisheries.