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Few studies to date have demonstrated widespread biological impacts of ocean acidification (OA) under conditions currently found in the natural environment. From a combined survey of physical and chemical water properties and biological sampling along the Washington-Oregon-California coast in August 2011, we show that large portions of the shelf waters are corrosive to pteropods in the natural environment. We show a strong positive correlation between the proportion of pteropod individuals with severe shell dissolution damage and the percentage of undersaturated water in the top 100 m with respect to aragonite. We found 53% of onshore individuals and 24% of offshore individuals on average to have severe dissolution damage. Relative to pre-industrial CO2 concentrations, the extent of undersaturated waters in the top 100 m of the water column has increased over sixfold along the California Current Ecosystem (CCE). We estimate that the incidence of severe pteropod shell dissolution owing to anthropogenic OA has doubled in near shore habitats since pre-industrial conditions across this region and is on track to triple by 2050. These results demonstrate that habitat suitability for pteropods in the coastal CCE is declining. The observed impacts represent a baseline for future observations towards understanding broader scale OA effects.

Carbonate chemistry variability is often poorly characterized in coastal regions and patterns of covariation with other biologically important variables such as temperature, oxygen concentration, and salinity are rarely evaluated. This absence of information hampers the design and interpretation of ocean acidification experiments that aim to characterize biological responses to future pCO2 levels relative to contemporary conditions. Here, we analyzed a large carbonate chemistry data set from Puget Sound, a fjord estuary on the U.S. west coast, and included measurements from three seasons (winter, summer, and fall). pCO2 exceeded the 2008-2011 mean atmospheric level (392 µatm) at all depths and seasons sampled except for the near-surface waters (< 10 m) in the summer. Further, undersaturated conditions with respect to the biogenic carbonate mineral aragonite were widespread (Ωar<1). We show that pCO2 values were relatively uniform throughout the water column and across regions in winter, enriched in subsurface waters in summer, and in the fall some values exceeded 2500 µatm in near-surface waters. Carbonate chemistry covaried to differing levels with temperature and oxygen depending primarily on season and secondarily on region. Salinity, which varied little (27 to 31), was weakly correlated with carbonate chemistry. We illustrate potential high-frequency changes in carbonate chemistry, temperature, and oxygen conditions experienced simultaneously by organisms in Puget Sound that undergo diel vertical migrations under present-day conditions. We used simple calculations to estimate future pCO2 and Ωar values experienced by diel vertical migrators based on an increase in atmospheric CO2. Given the potential for non-linear interactions between pCO2 and other abiotic variables on physiological and ecological processes, our results provide a basis for identifying control conditions in ocean acidification experiments for this region, but also highlight the wide range of carbonate chemistry conditions organisms may currently experience in this and similar coastal ecosystems.

Ecologists routinely set out to estimate the trophic position of individuals, populations, and species composing food webs, and nitrogen stable isotopes (δ(15)N) are a widely used proxy for trophic position. Although δ(15)N values are often sampled at the level of individuals, estimates and confidence intervals are frequently sought for aggregations of individuals. If individual δ(15)N values are correlated as an artifact of sampling design (e.g., clustering of samples in space or time) or due to intrinsic groupings (e.g., life history stages, social groups, taxonomy), such estimates may be biased and exhibit overly optimistic confidence intervals. However, these issues can be accommodated using hierarchical modeling methods. Here, we demonstrate how hierarchical models offer an additional quantitative tool for investigating δ(15)N variability and we explicitly evaluate how δ(15)N varies with body size at successively higher levels of taxonomic aggregation in a diverse fish assemblage. The models take advantage of all available data, better account for uncertainty in parameters estimates, may improve inferences on coefficients corresponding to groups with small to moderate sample sizes, and partition variation across model levels, which provides convenient summaries of the 'importance' of each level in terms of unexplained heterogeneity in the data. These methods can easily be applied to diet-based studies of trophic position. Although hierarchical models are well-understood and established tools, their benefits have yet to be fully reaped by stable isotope and food web ecologists. We suggest that hierarchical models can provide a robust framework for conceptualizing and statistically modeling trophic position at multiple levels of aggregation.