Tag Archives: freshwater

Fishing for Invaders

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Image Credit: California Department of Fish and Wildlife, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped

Angling as a source of non-native freshwater fish: a European review (2019) Carpio, De Miguel, Oteros, Hillstrom & Tortosa, Biological Invasions, doi.org/10.1007/s10530-019-02042-5

The Crux

People love fishing. It’s an intrinsic part of some people’s lives, whether as a livelihood or a past-time. People who have grown up fishing often have specific species that they enjoy fishing for. Nothing wrong with that.

Yet people’s desire to go after one fish species will often lead them to move that species around. This can happen on a small scale, with people moving a species from one lake to another slightly closer to their homes. Or it can happen on a massive one, with a species being transported to new continents.

This has shaped entire freshwater communities in modern-day Europe, where 195 species now reside that have no natural range in the continent. Most of these have been introduced since the nineteenth century, which is around the time that fishing became a popular recreational activity. This week’s authors wanted to find out what the role of recreational fishing was in shaping the make-up of today’s invasive freshwater fish populations in Europe.

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Are the Combined Effects of Human Development Worse Than the Sum of Their Parts?

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Decreases in river discharge can negatively affect fish like this sucker, but what happens when they’re compounded by local changes in land use? (Image Credit: Hotash, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)

Anthropogenic land-use change intensifies the effect of lows flows on stream fishes (2019) Walker, Girard, Alford & Walters, Journal of Applied Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13517

The Crux

Human activity can create a lot of different problems for the world’s ecosystems. These problems can impact an ecosystem simultaneously, often in different ways. For instance, a warming climate might push some species further towards the poles, but human structures like factories or mines might impede their dispersal. It’s relatively easy to study the effect of any one stressor that we place on a species, but looking at the interaction of multiple human-caused stressors is more difficult.

Take freshwater ecosystems. A warming climate means that there’s less snow and more rain in the winter, which reduces the river’s flow (or discharge) in summer. At the same time, nearby human construction can reduce nearby plant life, which in turn increases the amount of sediment washed into a river and lowers water quality. But do the two effects combined simply equal the sum of their parts, or does that combination make the total effect on local species even worse?

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Monitoring Freshwater Populations in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

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Radiation can have extremely negative effects on an individual. But is it as easy to measure its effects on an entire population? (Image Credit: Hnapel, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)

Variation in chronic radiation exposure does not drive life history divergence among Daphnia populations across the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (2019) Goodman et al., Ecology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4931

The Crux

As anyone who has recently watched HBO’s Chernobyl can tell you, large doses of radiation are capable of doing some pretty serious damage to an organism. But whilst examining the effect of radiation on an individual might be simple, monitoring those effects on a population can be difficult. Whilst radiation negatively effects fitness, it can also help individuals with higher radiation tolerance to reproduce and dominate within the population of a single species, making it difficult to monitor the exact effects of radiation on that population. If a population is filled with only those who were strong enough to survive, you don’t get an idea of the variation in the radiation’s effects.

This week’s researchers tried to break through that problem by looking at different populations of a water flea in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone (CEZ) – the area still barred from entry in eastern Europe.

What They Did

The researchers sampled populations of the water flea Daphnia pulex (see below) from 8 lakes within the CEZ, all of which had experienced different doses of radiation since the Chernobyl disaster. Information on how much radiation those lakes were subject to was taken from Ukraine’s radiation databases and water samples collected at the site. The 38 types of Daphnia from the 8 lakes were then transported back to a laboratory and bred for three generations. The survival and reproductive success of this third generation was then modelled against radiation dose.

Did You Know: Daphnia as Study Organisms

Some species are frequently used across different ecological disciplines as model organisms. One example is the genus Daphnia, a genus of water fleas. They have a short life cycle, and can reproduce asexually. This means that scientists have the opportunity to disentangle environmental effects on populations of genetically similar individuals, as well as between populations of different genetic backgrounds.

What They Found

Whilst reproductive success and survival varied between the populations of Daphnia at different lakes, this did not seem to occur as a result of radiation dose. Radiation did not have a pronounced effect on any fitness variable.

Problems?

Daphnia_pulex

The water flea Daphnia, here used to test the effects of radiation on populations (Image Credit: Paul Hebert, CC BY 2.5)

Sample size is of course an issue here. Only having 8 lakes to compare the effects of radiation on populations was always going to make an effect of radiation dose hard to find. It was made more difficult by the fact that the effects of one lake were significantly different to the others, skewing results considerably. This is of course no fault of the authors, and hopefully technology in the future will allow us to expand the data used in these projects.

So What?

It’s important to note here that these results do not necessarily mean that radiation has no effect on Daphnia populations. Radiation is known to have negative effects on individual fitness, so what this study could tell us is that we need to view radiation as an environmental process which acts in concert with a variety of other biotic factors. Perhaps a study which takes into account further environmental variables and more lake populations would be able to further advance the work done in this paper.

Keep Your Eyes Open

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Natural selection favors a larger eye in response to increased competition in natural populations of a vertebrate (2019) Beston & Walsh, Functional Ecology, doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.13334

The Crux

Studying the evolution of traits in response to selection pressure often helps us understand why species look and act the way they do. Selection pressure can include the need to find food before other members of your species, or the need to escape predation.

But what happens when improving your ability to obtain resources also means you’re more vulnerable to predation? Which will win out? This paper looks at a small species of freshwater fish, Rivulus hartii, and determines which of the two pressures contributes most to the evolution of the size of their eye.

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Fishers and Fish Science: The Australian Fish Scientist Perspective

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Fishing is an important part of Australian society. So is communication between fish scientists and fishers strong enough?

Fishing is an important part of Australian society. So is communication between fish scientists and fishers strong enough? (Image Credit: State Library of Queensland, Image Cropped)

Last Thursday, I posted an article on the need for more contact communication the fish scientist community and the fishing community, which you can find here. It gives a breakdown of why better communication between the two groups is mutually beneficial, and how it could be improved. The piece was written after talks with a number of prominent Australian fish biologists, whose thoughts I’ve shared in more detail below.

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Pond

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Dragonflies like this Western Pondhawk female are particularly vulnerable to warming due to climate change. (Image Credit: Eugene Zelenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)
Simulated climate change increases larval mortality, alters phenology, and affects flight morphology of a dragonfly (2018) McCauley et al., Ecosphere, doi:10.1002/ecs2.2151

The Crux

Climate change is something that we hear about on a daily basis. The dire warnings tend to concern sea levels rising and temperatures varying so much that we have more intense and deadly storms than before, but these are all direct effects of the climate. Another thing that climate change can do is have indirect effects on organisms.

Organisms with complex life cycles spend the juvenile part of their lives in one environment before moving on to the adult stage in another environment. The researchers in this study wanted to know how simulated climate change during the juvenile stage of the organisms lifetime could affect the adult stage.

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Peter Unmack & Karl Moy: Saving an Endangered Fish from Extinction

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A release of the formerly endangered Running River Rainbowfish. So how were they brought back from near-extinction?

A release of the formerly endangered Running River Rainbowfish. So how were they brought back from near-extinction? (Image Credit: Karl Moy, University of Canberra, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)

We talk a lot about getting the public interested in conservation and ecosystems on Ecology for the Masses, but we’ve rarely talked about how conserving a species is actually accomplished. Where does funding come from? How do you decide which individuals to save? And how do you allow a population room to grow?

In 2015, Peter Unmack was sampling in the Burdekin river system in northern Queensland, Australia, when he noticed an alien population of Eastern Rainbowfish had established in Running River. Specifically a 13km stretch bounded by two gorges, which housed the Running River Rainbowfish, a species distinct to this one stretch. Knowing that the presence of the Eastern Rainbowfish could spell the extinction of the local species, he started a crowdfunding initiative, and essentially saved the Running River Rainbowfish. I spoke to Peter and postgraduate student Karl Moy about the conservation effort.

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