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Peter Gaube Principal Oceanographer pgaube@apl.washington.edu Phone 206-616-0611 |
Education
B.A. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2003
M.S. Physical Oceanography, Nova Southeastern University, 2007
Ph.D. Oceanography, Oregon State University, 2012
Videos
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Tracking Swordfish for Ocean Research Scientists from the UW and WHOI are teaming with swordfish experts and Wildlife Computers to catch, tag, and track the location and diving depth of swordfish. These apex predators are an ideal oceanographic platform to study the ocean twilight zone, home to the largest biomass of fish on the planet. |
4 Nov 2019
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White Sharks as Oceanographic Research Platforms Shark swimming paths and feeding behaviors are giving Peter Gaube and his colleagues some new insights to the annual phytoplankton bloom cycle in the North Atlantic. They are at sea during the month of May on the NAAMES project the North Atlantic Aerosol and Marine Ecosystem Study. The sharks, tagged with satellite tracking sensors, swim and dive deeply in ocean eddies, preferring those that are warmer and have lower primary production. Gaube's expertise is oceanic mesoscale eddies and meanders, the spinning masses of water 10100 km across that make up the ocean's weather and impact the ecosystem. A goal of NAAMES is to characterize the phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish inside and outside mesoscale eddies to probe mechanistic physicalbiological interactions. |
3 May 2016
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Publications |
2000-present and while at APL-UW |
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Global satellite-observed daily vertical migrations of ocean animals Behrenfeld, M.J., P. Gaube, A. Della Penna, R.T. O'Malley, W.J. Burt, Y. Hu, P.S. Bontempi, D.K. Steinberg, E.S. Boss, D.A. Siegel, C.A. Hostetler, P.D. Torfell, and S.C. Doney, "Global satellite-observed daily vertical migrations of ocean animals," Nature, EOR, doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1796-9, 2019. |
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27 Nov 2019 ![]() |
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Every night across the world's oceans, numerous marine animals arrive at the surface of the ocean to feed on plankton after an upward migration of hundreds of metres. Just before sunrise, this migration is reversed and the animals return to their daytime residence in the dark mesopelagic zone (at a depth of 2001,000 m). This daily excursion, referred to as diel vertical migration (DVM), is thought of primarily as an adaptation to avoid visual predators in the sunlit surface layer and was first recorded using ship-net hauls nearly 200 years ago. Nowadays, DVMs are routinely recorded by ship-mounted acoustic systems (for example, acoustic Doppler current profilers). These data show that night-time arrival and departure times are highly conserved across ocean regions and that daytime descent depths increase with water clarity, indicating that animals have faster swimming speeds in clearer waters. However, after decades of acoustic measurements, vast ocean areas remain unsampled and places for which data are available typically provide information for only a few months, resulting in an incomplete understanding of DVMs. Addressing this issue is important, because DVMs have a crucial role in global ocean biogeochemistry. Night-time feeding at the surface and daytime metabolism of this food at depth provide an efficient pathway for carbon and nutrient export. |
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Mesoscale eddies release pelagic sharks from thermal constraints to foraging in the ocean twilight zone Braun, C.D., P. Gaube, T.H. Sinclair-Taylor, G.B. Skomal, and S.R. Thorrold, "Mesoscale eddies release pelagic sharks from thermal constraints to foraging in the ocean twilight zone," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 116, 17,187-17,192, doi:10.1073/pnas.1903067116, 2019. |
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Mesoscale eddies are critical components of the ocean’s "internal weather" system. Mixing and stirring by eddies exerts significant control on biogeochemical fluxes in the open ocean, and eddies may trap distinctive plankton communities that remain coherent for months and can be transported hundreds to thousands of kilometers. Debate regarding how and why predators use fronts and eddies, for example as a migratory cue, enhanced forage opportunities, or preferred thermal habitat, has been ongoing since the 1950s. The influence of eddies on the behavior of large pelagic fishes, however, remains largely unexplored. Here, we reconstruct movements of a pelagic predator, the blue shark (Prionace glauca), in the Gulf Stream region using electronic tags, earth-observing satellites, and data-assimilating ocean forecasting models. Based on >2,000 tracking days and nearly 500,000 high-resolution time series measurements collected by 15 instrumented individuals, we show that blue sharks seek out the interiors of anticyclonic eddies where they dive deep while foraging. Our observations counter the existing paradigm that anticyclonic eddies are unproductive ocean "deserts" and suggest anomalously warm temperatures in these features connect surface-oriented predators to the most abundant fish community on the planet in the mesopelagic. These results also shed light on the ecosystem services provided by mesopelagic prey. Careful consideration will be needed before biomass extraction from the ocean twilight zone to avoid interrupting a key link between planktonic production and top predators. Moreover, robust associations between targeted fish species and oceanographic features increase the prospects for effective dynamic ocean management. |
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Movement ecology and stenothermy of satellite-tagged shortbill spearfish (Tetrapturus angustirostris) Arostegui, M.C., P. Gaube, and C.D. Braun, "Movement ecology and stenothermy of satellite-tagged shortbill spearfish (Tetrapturus angustirostris)," Fish. Res., 215, 21-25, doi:10.1016/j.fishres.2019.03.005, 2019. |
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The shortbill spearfish (Tetrapturus angustirostris) is an understudied, istiophorid billfish primarily encountered as bycatch in pelagic commercial fisheries of the Indo-Pacific. The species is listed as data-deficient, and little is known of its biology, ecology, and population structure or status. We assessed the species' movement ecology and thermal niche with telemetry data from the first shortbill spearfishes ever outfitted with pop-up satellite archival transmitting tags (n = 3 with successfully transmitted data). Short (415 day) deployments offshore of the Island of Hawai'i revealed that spearfish primarily occupied the mixed layer, spending >90% of each 24-hr period between the surface and 100 m in water temperatures between 2426°C. These individuals consistently exhibited vertical activity at night regardless of the prevailing lunar phase. Nocturnal movements throughout the mixed layer may enable shortbill spearfish to forage on mesopelagic species undergoing diel vertical migration and reduce trophic niche overlap with primarily diurnal, pelagic species. The narrow thermal distribution of shortbill spearfish in this study, almost exclusively within 2°C of sea surface temperature, suggests that they are more stenothermal than extra-generic istiophorid species. |
In The News
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Swordfish as oceanographers? Satellite tags allow research of ocean's 'twilight zone' off Florida UW News, Hannah Hickey Researchers from the University of Washington are using high-tech tags to record the movements of swordfish big, deep-water, migratory, open-ocean fish that are poorly studied and get a window into the ocean depths they inhabit. |
4 Nov 2019
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Why great white sharks hang out in warm whirlpools National Geographic, Douglas Main New research on famous white sharks Mary Lee and Lydia shows the giant fish spend a surprising amount of time in warm oceanic eddies. |
19 Jun 2018
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Great white sharks dive deep into warm-water whirlpools in the Atlantic UW News, Hannah Hickey A study from the University of Washington and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution looked at the movements of adult female white sharks in the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Ocean. Results showed, surprisingly, that they prefer warm-water eddies the clockwise-spinning whirlpools in the ocean and tend to spend more time deep inside these slowly spinning features. |
18 Jun 2018
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Inventions
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Continuous Underway Multi-sensor Profiler Record of Invention Number: 48207 |
Disclosure
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15 Nov 2017
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