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Bottom-Up Effects on Biomass Versus Top-Down Effects on Identity: A Multiple-Lake Fish Community Manipulation Experiment

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Abstract

The extent to which ecosystems are regulated by top-down relative to bottom-up control has been a dominant paradigm in ecology for many decades. For lakes, it has been shown that predation by fish is an important determinant of variation in zooplankton and phytoplankton community characteristics. Effects of fish are expected to not only be a function of total fish biomass, but also of functional composition of the fish community. Previous research on the importance of trophic cascades in lakes has largely focused on the role of zooplanktivorous and piscivorous fish. We conducted a large-scale multiple-lake fish community manipulation experiment to test for the effect of differences in fish functional community composition on the trophic structure of lakes. We examine the effect of top-down and bottom-up factors on phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass as well as on their community composition. We put our data in a broader perspective by comparing our results to data of a survey that also included ponds with low fish densities as well as ponds with very high densities of fish. Our results indicate that the overall food web structure under relative high fish densities is primarily structured by bottom-up factors, whereas community characteristics seem to be primarily regulated by top-down factors. Our results suggest a subtle interplay between bottom-up and top-down factors, in which bottom-up factors dominate in determining quantities while top-down effects are important in determining identities of the communities.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the local fish farmers for their help with the fish stock assessments, and we thank Kevin Hoovelts for his assistance in the field. This study was funded by the Agency for Nature and Forests via a national TWOL project (LIM/AMINAL/AN/LIM/2004/10), and by BioDivERsA project TIPPINGPOND (nationally funded by Belspo). PL enjoyed a grant from the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT-Flanders).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Aquatic Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, KU Leuven, Charles Deberiotstraat 32, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Pieter Lemmens, Karen Tuytens & Luc De Meester

  2. Department of Aquatic Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Steven A. J. Declerck

  3. Laboratory of Aquatic Biology, KU Leuven Kulak, Kortrijk, Belgium

    Maarten Vanderstukken

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  1. Pieter Lemmens
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  4. Maarten Vanderstukken
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Correspondence to Pieter Lemmens.

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Author Contributions

PL, SAJD, MV and LDM conceived and designed the study. PL, KT and MV carried out the experiment. PL analyzed the data. PL, SAJD, KT, MV and LDM wrote the paper.

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Lemmens, P., Declerck, S.A.J., Tuytens, K. et al. Bottom-Up Effects on Biomass Versus Top-Down Effects on Identity: A Multiple-Lake Fish Community Manipulation Experiment. Ecosystems 21, 166–177 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-017-0144-x

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