In addition, overfishing tends to lead to decline in these large predatory fish so that the relative numbers of low trophic level small fish and invertebrates increases.

This is what the Exxon Valdez scientists thought would happen, this trophic cascade where you lose the kelp and the herring and other fishes and going up.

Using these models, Kuwait estimates the lost biomass in commercially valuable species, including finfish and shrimp, and categorizes each species into one of three trophic levels (primary, secondary and tertiary consumers).

The demise of one species or trophic level (which contains organisms performing the same function in the food chain), leads to changes in others in a rapid sequence that is difficult to foresee.

We started hypothesizing what do we know? what do with think would be a trophic cascade? which means that somebody gets wiped out, and then everything above that's eating those guys will crash.

By applying trophic scaling to convert the lost biomass of secondary and tertiary consumers into an estimated loss in units of primary consumer biomass, Kuwait estimates that its loss of aquatic biota amounts to 70,000 tonnes of shrimp biomass.

This also leads to a phenomenon known as fishing down marine food webs , whereby second level marine life preyed upon by the fish at the top of the trophic levels are increasingly used for human consumption, thus causing further disruptive effects on the whole food chain.

These migrators make a significant contribution to the rapid transport of carbon from the surface layers to depth, but this is secondary to sinking of surface production.11 The daily migrating plankton and micronekton layers are also critical in trophic focusing in areas of elevated topography (see Seamounts).

The baseline reference includes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of faunal assemblages, a compilation of the morphological identification of the taxa, an assessment of the taxonomic richness, the faunal composition, the relative abundance of the megafauna and the assessment of functional and trophic groups within particularly well explored areas.

OSCAR includes an oil spill physical fates sub model that estimates the distribution of contaminants on the water surface, on shorelines, in the water column and in sediments as well as exposure and population sub models which together estimate the effects of contaminants on eggs, larvae, juvenile and adult fish, wildlife and lower trophic level biota.