Fishing down then up the food web of an invaded lake.

ABSTRACT: Analysis of commercial catches reveals a serial depletion of some oceanic fish stocks over time, resulting in fisheries focusing on increasingly smaller species closer to the base of the food chain. This effect, described as fishing down the marine food web, is observed when the trophic level of the catch declines over time, raising concerns about the ecosystem impacts of fishing. Freshwater systems also experience harvest, yet do not appear to commonly show the same fishing down response perhaps because time series are too short to witness early depletions, fishing is often recreational, or other factors like stocking and invasive species influence patterns. Here we make use of extensive catch records from Lake Simcoe dating back to the 1860s, to examine if fishing down effects are observ

SUBMITTER: Dunlop ES 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6778268 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature