1. A preliminary comparison of the trophic structure of some large marine ecosystems Rainer Froese, IfM Uwe Piatkowski, IfM Stefan Garthe, FTZ Daniel Pauly, UBC

2. Overview Need to Understand Marine Ecosystems Available data: species composition, trophic level of species Approach: compare trophic signatures between groups of organisms and between ecosystems

3. Hypotheses Hypothesis I: A given taxonomic group will have similar signatures in similar ecosystems Hypothesis II: Different taxonomic groups will have different signatures

4. Number of Marine Fish Species by Trophic Level

5. Trophic Signatures of Fish Species: Tropical LMEs

6. Trophic Signatures of Fish Species: Tropical and Temperate, Brackish LMEs

7. Trophic Signatures of Fishes in Five LMEs

8. Mean Max Length of Fishes by Trophic Level

9. Trophic Structure of Fish, Birds, Cephalopods and Marine Mammals in the North Sea

10. Trophic Pyramid by Species Numbers for the North Sea

11. Conclusions Species Composition of Ecosystems and Trophic Signatures are Long-term Characters Trophic Signatures Can be Used to Classify Groups of Organisms and LMEs Strong Separation between Vertebrates and Invertebrates at Troph 3 Finer Resolution Needed for Lower Levels

12. Thank You We thank the FishBase team for encoding much of the data used in this study and for programming the various tools (TrophLab, Trophic Pyramids). Data and tools are available at www.fishbase.org