Pleistocene marine fish invasions and paleoenvironmental reconstructions in the eastern Mediterranean Konstantina Agiadi a, * , Angela Girone b , Efterpi Koskeridou a , Pierre Moissette a, c , Jean-Jacques Corn  ee d, e , Fr  ed  eric Quill  ev  er  e f a Department of Historical Geology and Palaeontology, Faculty of Geology and Geoenvironment, University of Athens, Panepistimioupolis, 15784, Athens, Greece b Facolt a di Scienze, Dipartimento di Geologia e Geofisica, Universit a Degli Studi di Bari, Campus Universitario, Via E. Orabona 4, 70125, Bari, Italy c Mus eum National d’Histoire Naturelle, D epartement Histoire de la Terre, 8 rue Buffon, 75005, Paris, France d G eosciences Montpellier, Universit e de Montpellier, Universit e des Antilles, CNRS, Pointe  a Pitre, Guadeloupe, FWI, France e G eosciences Montpellier, Universit e de Montpellier, Universit e des Antilles, CNRS, Montpellier, France f Univ. Lyon, Universit e Claude Bernard Lyon 1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, UMR 5276 LGL-TPE, F-69622, Villeurbanne, France article info Article history: Received 17 May 2018 Received in revised form 19 July 2018 Accepted 23 July 2018 Keywords: Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation Paleoclimatology Paleogeography Europe Micropaleontology Biological invasions Otolith Biogeography abstract Marine bioinvasions affect ecosystems in irreversible ways, creating socio-economic problems world- wide. In particular, eastern Mediterranean marine fish faunas today are significantly disturbed due to overfishing, habitat deterioration, the Lessepsian invasion, and climate change. Isolating the impact of each parameter is difficult, because pre-anthropogenic activity data are lacking. In this study, we use the paleontological record to infer the causes and mechanisms behind marine fish invasions, focusing on the Mediterranean basin, which is a restricted basin and a biological hotspot, where the effects of climatic and oceanographic changes are amplified. Therefore, the Mediterranean Sea is an ideal area to study marine biological invasions in relation to abrupt climate changes. Furthermore, we focus on the Pleis- tocene, which was a period of intense glacialeinterglacial changes. Thus, we investigate the effect of climate changes on the fish fauna of an eastern Mediterranean shelf, by identifying the fish otoliths in the EarlyeMiddle Pleistocene marine sediments of Rhodes (Greece). We offer a synthesis of the Mediter- ranean marine fish from the Tortonian until today and hypothesize on the conditions that drove marine fish distribution range shifts during the Pleistocene. We reconstruct the paleobathymetric evolution of the study areas based on fish otoliths, and we consider taphonomy in our interpretations. The Pleistocene climatic variability induced periodic and gradual replacements of fish taxa. Episodic invasions of cold- water North Atlantic mesopelagic species are correlated with intervals of climatic deterioration, spe- cifically during marine isotope stages 50, 44, 36, 20, and 18. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Marine ecosystems worldwide are severely disturbed by bio- logical invasions, with direct socio-economic implications for their dependent human populations (Pauly et al., 2005; Byrnes et al., 2007; Early et al., 2016; Dawson et al., 2017; Seebens et al., 2017). This phenomenon is especially intense in the eastern Mediterra- nean Sea, where alien marine species increasingly invade Medi- terranean waters from the Red Sea via the Suez Canal (Lessepsian invasion) and the Atlantic Ocean (Galil et al., 2015; Rilov, 2016; Piroddi et al., 2017). Marine fish invasions are a major issue with the present-day global warming (Perry et al., 2005; P€ ortner and Knust, 2007; Walther et al., 2009; Cheung et al., 2009; Comte and Olden, 2017). Fish are strongly affected by climatic and oceanographic changes (Rose, 2005), through processes (such as distribution shifts, life- style adaptations, extinctions, and morphological modifications) that are not well-known and species-specific. In the Mediterranean, in particular, the distribution of pelagic fish in the western, central, and eastern parts of the basin has been linked to different modes of climatic variability (Tsikliras et al., 2018). Moreover, geographic boundaries, such as sills, may restrict the distribution of deep- water demersal species, but not those of pelagic and mesopelagic * Corresponding author. E-mail address: kagiadi@geol.uoa.gr (K. Agiadi). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary Science Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quascirev https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.07.037 0277-3791/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Quaternary Science Reviews 196 (2018) 80e99