Abstract
The ecology of dryland rivers is driven by their highly variable hydrology, particularly flooding regimes, whereby intermittent floods typically generate ‘booms’ of primary and secondary productivity, including massive fish production. We tested these concepts in the Moonie River, Australia, using the percichthyid, Macquaria ambigua, a dryland river species known to display pronounced ‘boom and bust’ abundance patterns in response to floodplain inundation followed by extended periods of low to no channel flow. We expected that body condition (as measured by whole body lipid content) and biomass of M. ambigua would be related to prey biomass, and that these factors would all ‘spike’ following widespread flooding. Instead we found more subtle responses. There were ‘booms’ in biomass of Macrobrachium and zooplankton, two important food items, whereas M. ambigua maintained relatively low but sustained lipid and biomass levels following flooding. It appears that instead of a ‘boom’ in fish biomass, abundant invertebrate food resources and sustained lipid levels contributed to high survivorship of this species during the ‘bust’ period over cool dry months.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, and the Department of Environment and Resource Management for supporting and supervising the Honours research programme of which this paper forms a part. The authors would like to thank Rene Diocares, Joel Huey, Leigh Bennett and Raymonde de Lathouder for their help with laboratory and field work. We also thank the landholders of the Moonie River Catchment for providing access to sites. Two anonymous reviewers are thanked for their helpful comments on the manuscript. This research was conducted under the Queensland Fisheries Permit PRM00157K and Griffith University Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee permit AES/14/05/AEC.
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Sternberg, D., Balcombe, S.R., Marshall, J.C. et al. Subtle ‘boom and bust’ response of Macquaria ambigua to flooding in an Australian dryland river. Environ Biol Fish 93, 95–104 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-011-9895-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-011-9895-y