Equatorial Pacific and everything downstream of it
The ocean breathes.
The wild answers.
Every El Niño and La Niña rearranges where animals can eat, breed and survive: anchoveta off Peru, elephants in Zimbabwe, butterflies over Los Angeles. This is a living atlas of those movements: what is moving under the current phase, every documented shift since 1950, the cascades that connect them, and an honest look at what the 2026 El Niño, already past the 2015 daily record in Niño 3.4, is likely to set in motion.
Companion to Pulse of the Pacific, which tracks the ocean itself. This instrument tracks what the ocean does to the living world.
The living map
Where the animals go when the Pacific switches state
Pacific-centred so the whole oscillation fits in one frame. Choose a phase to see the documented responses: arrows are movements, pulsing rings are booms, breeding surges or die-offs in place. Every marker opens a species; drag to pan, double-click to zoom.
Live sightings
The century-long memory, with the animals added
Every El Niño and La Niña since 1950, and what moved
The Oceanic Niño Index is the same heartbeat trace that Pulse of the Pacific draws. Above it sit the documented wildlife events, coloured by habitat. Hover for the reading of any season; click an event to read it and put it on the map.
Move across the chart to read any season.
Warm bars are El Niño episodes, cool bars La Niña, faded bars neutral seasons; the pale band is the ±0.5 °C threshold. Bars for 2025–26 come from NOAA's new ERSSTv6 table and are drawn faded until the feed replaces the whole series.
The species atlas
Forty indicators, from copepods to elephants
Each entry gives the species' documented response to both phases, the mechanism behind it, and every event on the timeline that involved it. Strong indicators respond reliably in nearly every event; moderate ones respond when the event stacks with a heatwave, a drought or a lag.
The physics, followed into the food web
How a change in wind becomes a change in wildlife
Four chains explain almost everything on the map. Each is a sequence, so each is numbered; play one to watch the signal travel from the equator to the animals at the end of it.
What comes next
An honest outlook for the living world
Nothing here is a forecast of individual animals. Each card lists what strong past events of the same kind set in motion in that region, when in the season it happened, and the analog years that documented it. Confidence is high where the response has repeated in nearly every comparable event.
Read this before you trust a card. ENSO shifts the odds of an ecological response; it does not determine it. Local heatwaves, the Indian Ocean Dipole, fishing pressure and habitat loss all bend the outcome, and every population starts from where the last event left it. For management decisions, consult the agencies listed under Data.
Your part of the instrument
Field log
Unusual animals are the first evidence of an event, and most of them are seen by people who are not scientists: a red crab on a beach, a dorado in a bay, an empty colony. Keep a log here. Entries stay in this browser only, plot on the map, and copy out as JSON. Then put the sighting where researchers will find it: on iNaturalist.
Entries in this browser (0)
Data and methods
Where this comes from
Built on open climate and biodiversity data. Served from its own domain with the included pipeline, the readout, the ONI trace and the sightings layer refresh on each source's natural cadence; the atlas and timeline are curated from the published record.
Movements on the map
Arrows and rings are documented responses, not real-time telemetry: each is the direction and kind of change that the species showed in at least one strong event of that phase, placed at the location where it was recorded. Telemetry from public Movebank studies can be added to the pipeline where licences allow.
The live layer
A scheduled job resolves each indicator species on iNaturalist, pulls the last 60 days of verifiable observations and a monthly histogram since 2010, reads the current ONI and alert status, and writes data/live.json. The page loads that file first, falls back to direct iNaturalist calls, and finally to the embedded snapshot, and always says which it is using.
Timeline and phases
Episodes are coloured by the NOAA rule: five consecutive overlapping seasons at or beyond ±0.5 °C. The embedded series is NOAA's ERSSTv5 ONI through 2024 with the 2025–26 rows from the ERSSTv6 table that replaced it (the two differ by about 0.1 °C); the feed replaces the whole series with one current table, and the newest two seasons are always marked provisional because NOAA revises them for up to two months. The readout headlines RONI, the relative index that became NOAA's official measure on 1 February 2026 (NWS PNS 26-05); the timeline keeps the ONI so it matches Pulse of the Pacific.
Counts and figures
Mortality figures are the ones reported by the responsible agency or the cited study, rounded and never extrapolated. Where a number is disputed the atlas says roughly, or about. Conservation status is linked, not stored: every species entry opens its current IUCN Red List assessment. Anything not documented in the sources below is not on this page.