The Stream Microbiome: An Ecosystem’s Health Report Card

Image Credit: mstk east, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
Image Credit: mstk east, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
Image Credit: Manfred Antranias Zimmer, Pixabay licence, Image Cropped
Invasion of freshwater ecosystems is promoted by network connectivity to hotspots of human activity (2019) Chapman et al., Global Ecology and Biogeography, https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13051
The spread of invasive species throughout freshwater ecosystems is a topic we’ve looked at before on Ecology for the Masses. In a previous paper breakdown we talked about how recreational is heavily responsible for the presence of non-native fish at a European scale.
Our paper this week takes a more local approach. Can we predict the presence of non-native birds, invertebrates and fish by looking at the presence of human activity, and where that human activity is present?
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
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.
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
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?
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)
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.
Dams like this change the flow regimes of rivers, and prevent some species from accessing their spawning grounds, lowering population viability. But is removing them completely danger-free? (Image Credit: Notorious4Life, CC0 1.0, Image Cropped)
NINA researcheer Annette Taugbøl with a female pink salmon, caught electrofishing in northern Norway (Photo Credit: Jon Museth, NINA-Lillehammer, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)
Guest post by Odd Terje Sandlund