Abstract
Global food security relies on protein and essential micronutrients provided by seafood1–3. The importance of seafood-derived micronutrients to human health suggests that consuming diverse aquatic species could enhance human well-being4. Though biodiversity provides important benefits to humanity5, it is unclear how changes in species diversity could affect the human health benefits provided by aquatic ecosystems. A key scientific question remains unanswered - does increasing species diversity in seafood diets improve their ability to meet nutritional needs? Here we found that increasing species diversity allows seafood diets to fulfill multiple nutritional requirements simultaneously, a condition necessary for human health. Aquatic species with different ecological traits have distinct and complementary micronutrient profiles. The same complementarity mechanisms that generate positive biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems also operate in seafood assemblages, allowing for more diverse diets to yield increased nutritional benefits. Notably, nutritional metrics that capture multiple micronutrients essential for human well-being depend more strongly on biodiversity than ecological measures of function such as productivity. In contrast to the micronutrients, we found that increasing species diversity did not increase the amount of protein in seafood diets. We provide the first direct link between multiple nutritional benefits of biodiversity and an ecosystem service underpinning human wellbeing, thereby unifying biodiversity ecosystem functioning theory and human health. Our findings demonstrate that minimizing biodiversity loss at local and global scales will benefit global food and nutrition security.
Footnotes
Funding: Funding was provided by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship to JRB.
Competing interests: We declare no competing interests.
Data and materials availability: All data and code will be archived at the Dryad digital repository.