Abstract
For organisms that remain active in one of the last undisturbed and pristine dark environments on the planet—the Arctic Polar Night—the moon, stars and aurora borealis may provide important cues to guide distribution and behaviours, including predator-prey interactions. With a changing climate and increased human activities in the Arctic, such natural light sources will in many places be masked by the much stronger illumination from artificial light. Here we show that normal working-light from a ship may disrupt fish and zooplankton behaviour down to at least 200 m depth across an area of >0.125 km2 around the ship. Both the quantitative and qualitative nature of the disturbance differed between the examined regions. We conclude that biological surveys in the dark from illuminated ships may introduce biases on biological sampling, bioacoustic surveys, and possibly stock assessments of commercial and non-commercial species.
Highlights
For organisms that remain active in one of the last undisturbed and pristine dark environments on the planet—the Arctic Polar Night—the moon, stars and aurora borealis may provide important cues to guide distribution and behaviours, including predator-prey interactions
Of all coastal regions are believed to be exposed to scattered artificial light that is reflected back from a cloud rich atmosphere[2,3], while artificial lights from cities, coastlines, roads and marine infrastructures are visible from outer space
The change in vertical distribution of fish and zooplankton was relatively limited at all three sites (Table 2), suggesting that the instantaneous decrease or increase in backscatter is first related to a change in orientation rather than a rapid descent or ascent. These differences in response suggest that there is no unequivocal way of characterising the effect of artificial light, but that knowledge about both physical and biological factors are key to predicting the effect of artificial light from a ship on its surroundings
Summary
For organisms that remain active in one of the last undisturbed and pristine dark environments on the planet—the Arctic Polar Night—the moon, stars and aurora borealis may provide important cues to guide distribution and behaviours, including predator-prey interactions. With a changing climate and increased human activities in the Arctic, such natural light sources will in many places be masked by the much stronger illumination from artificial light. We show that normal working-light from a ship may disrupt fish and zooplankton behaviour down to at least 200 m depth across an area of >0.125 km[2] around the ship. Both the quantitative and qualitative nature of the disturbance differed between the examined regions. Many marine organisms stay active and are able to adjust their behaviour to the diel cycle of background solar illumination[13,14,15]
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