A Holocene record of marine fish remains from the Northeastern Pacific

✍ Scribed by V. Tunnicliffe; J.M. O'Connell; M.R. McQuoid

• Book ID: 104156935
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 337 KB
• Volume: 174
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0025-3227
• DOI: 10.1016/s0025-3227(00)00150-x

✦ Synopsis

Ocean Drilling Program Leg 169S retrieved a complete Holocene sequence from Saanich Inlet, British Columbia, Canada. Fish and diatom remains were extracted from sediments at Site 1034. Very small ®sh bones, teeth and scales were ubiquitous except in the lowermost glaciomarine clays; scales degraded with depth. In the identi®able fraction, Paci®c herring were the most abundant with Paci®c hake and cartilaginous ®sh yielding signi®cant fractions. Fish remains appear just before 12 000 BP but greatest diversity does not occur until about 6500 BP. A smoothed abundance curve highlights two periods of maximal abundance at about 1500 and 6500 BP. Abundances in the last 1000 years are lower than the rest of the record. A correlation with abundances of seven phytoplankton taxa is signi®cant; diatoms explain about a third of the variance. This study demonstrates the use of ®sh and diatoms from the same paleosedimentary matrix to examine millennia-scale correlations between primary and tertiary production.