Figure 1

Average sea surface circulation in the western Mediterranean and biological time series locations. The lobster settlement index (LSI, red circles) belongs to different marine protected areas (MPAs) at two sites, one in the northernmost basin (NCat) and three in the Balearic Islands (North, NW and South Mallorca, green area and figure inset) (a). The jellyfish stinging index (JSI, blue circles) covered three tourist hot-spot locations in the Balearic Islands with different orientations and exposed to different water masses (E Ibiza, N Mallorca and S Menorca). Squares denote FAO Geographical Statistical SubAreas (GSAs) used to interpret the connectivity of LSI lobster series (see “Methods”). The Gulf of Lions (GoL, light orange area) and Balearic Sea (BS, light green area) indicate the areas where ocean-atmosphere fluxes were extracted for comparison against field records. A 10-year climatology of drifter sources (%) reaching either NCat (b) or Mallorca (c) is displayed as the particle location eight months before the observations (origin). Source geographic locations were aggregated in monthly density maps of \(0.25 \times 0.25^\circ \). NC, Northern Current in red. LS, Ligurian Sea. SoG, Strait of Gibraltar. The figure and superimposed maps were created using “M Map: A mapping package for MATLAB”, v.1.4m (www.eoas.ubc.ca/~rich/map.html) in MATLAB v.R2010b (www.mathworks.com).