Blobby creatures washed up on West Coast beaches during marine warming, sucking up energy

Comparison of the two models showed which organisms received more and less energy, and found pyrosomes were by far the greatest benefactor while other species, like jellyfish, sardines, cod and certain types of sea snails and slugs, lost out.

Until the onset of the 2014 heat wave, pyrosomes had never been detected in 25 years of NOAA surveys, Gomes said. Each cylindrical pyrosome, which have been found to be up to 3 feet long, is a colony of tunicates a few millimeters long, he said. Pyrosomes are typically found farther south and are free-floating filter feeders consuming phytoplankton.

"They went from being zero — completely absent as far as anybody knows — to being one of the most abundant things in the entire ecosystem," Gomes said.

According to the study, pyrosomes have been considered "trophic dead ends" since they have low energy content and most of them end up as detritus. It's not clear how nutritious they are to the species who have consumed them in recent years, Gomes said, which means species further up the food chain, from the fish caught commercially to marine mammals, have likely been affected.

"That has an impact on the entire ecosystem ... the pyrosome is consuming energy that normally would have gone through multiple prey to eventually end up in a salmon," he said.

With global climate change, marine heat waves are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, but what exactly the next few years will look like for the Northern California Current is unclear, Gomes said. The study takes a "first stab" at the impacts of the heat wave by looking before and after 2014 but does not predict what the food web could look like if temperatures were to return to normal or how the food web has changed in between periods of heat since 2014, he said.

"The take-home here for people and food security is that we want to know how fishery resources are shifting so we can better manage our oceans. We don't want to deplete our resources. We don't want to make any ecosystems collapse," Gomes said.

The model and research was made possible by detailed ocean surveys and investments by NOAA and other scientific organizations, which are not available in other countries near oceans, he said.

Gomes is a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and was previously in a postdoctoral position with the Marine Sciences Center at Oregon State University. OSU assistant professor Joshua Stewart was a co-author of the study.