Fish out of place : Evaluating the impacts of fish introductions on freshwater ecosystems

Fish introductions, unlike many other clades, are often carried out purposefully. This is a worldwide practice, which has been ongoing since ancient times and has found new powerful ways to increase in magnitude and scope through the development of more effective transport and with increasing population wealth. Even though the literature is building up pace fast with this relatively recent phenomenon, information is still lacking on the mechanisms and results of the impact that introduced fish have on freshwater ecosystems. Remote small lakes at high-latitudes can be used to evaluate some of these impacts, as they are of limited size and often host relatively simple food webs with a single species of introduced fish, which makes them ideal model systems. Many areas are not as easy to investigate, as they present much more complex ecosystems where complex species interactions take place. For example, artificial lotic systems with a high number of species interactions can be particularly challenging to tackle as other anthropogenic/environmental stressors might be challenging to disentangle. This thesis focused on three main themes which addressed the reliance of introduced fish on terrestrial energy, their cascading effects on the food web and their interaction with native species. The first two themes used brown trout introduced in remote small lake ecosystems at high latitudes as a model, whereas the last theme used a complex lotic system at low latitudes where multiple species were introduced at different times. The chapters of this thesis used neo- and paleolimnological techniques to investigate the impacts of introduced fish, sometimes in combination. In particular, the first theme was tackled through the use of stomach content, fatty acids and stable isotopes to unravel the feeding ecology of introduced brown trout. The second theme was instead addressed through multiple paleo-proxies in combination with neolimnological analyses and models. The last theme was investigated through the analysis of long-term environmental and fish-assemblage data. Our findings suggest that terrestrial sources could be highly important in supporting introduced brown trout populations in small lakes at high latitudes. Despite challenges inherent to the turnover rates of fish liver and muscle tissues, which were longer than previously thought, this support did not vary across different years or fish densities, but was affected by seasonal factors over the course of the open-water season. Our results also suggest that introduced brown trout affect the food web of host lakes through trophic cascades, altering the abundance of pelagic and benthic micro- and macroinvertebrates, probably through a modification of the distribution of macro-invertebrate communities. According to a bioenergetic and a mass balance model, introduced brown trout nutrient regeneration should have increased lake productivity; however paleo-proxies indicated no such change but rather a shift from pelagic to benthic productivity. Finally, our results suggest that, in artificial lotic systems at low latitudes, environmental chemistry did not play a role in the decline of the native fish species communities. Rather, this was a result of the interaction between some of the introduced fish species and the native ones, enhanced by the habitat simplification and the peculiar water fluctuation regime.