Trophic interactions in the pelagic area of lakes and the opposing effects of fish feeding (top-down) and phytoplankton biomass (bottom-up) on zooplankton communities are central topics in limnology. We hypothesized that zooplankton size distributions should be a more sensitive approach to disentangle top-down and bottom-up effects than the commonly measured zooplankton biomass. We examined zooplankton size distributions from 148 samples collected during summer months in the upper and lower pelagic layers of a deep mesotrophic lake among 13 years of sampling. Top-down effects, namely fish size and biomass, and bottom-up effects, including water temperature and total phosphorus and chlorophyll a concentrations, were considered. To add robustness to our analyses, we expressed the zooplankton size distributions as size spectra based on log-binning, as continuous size spectra and by the size diversity, a measure that has been developed to mimic taxonomic diversity indices. Among numerous regressions tested, significant top-down or bottom-up effects could rarely been detected. Our results indicate that the overall zooplankton size distribution was not significantly affected by fish predation and lake productivity measured as total phosphorus or chlorophyll a concentration. However, we found negative correlations between fish biomass and the preferred zooplankton prey, including Bosmina longirostris, Daphnia cucullata and nauplii in the upper depth layer. However, due to their small body size, low biomass and therefore relative small contribution to the zooplankton size distribution, predation on preferred zooplankton species did not translate into a statistically significant modification of the entire size spectrum. Consequently, the size spectrum seems to be relatively robust against predation effects, but might reflect the lake-wide energy availability and transfer efficiency in the food web.

Net sampling by trawling and hydroacoustics was used to methodologically compare size spectra (SS) of the pelagic fish community in a deep lake across 12 years of sampling. Hydroacoustic SS were generated based on either single-echo detections (SEDs) or tracked-echo groups (TEGs) from 20 cross-lake transects. Trawl SS were obtained by a midwater trawl in four pelagic depth layers. All SS were derived from maximum likelihood estimations of exponent b of a continuous fish body mass distribution. The arithmetic mean exponent b was similar for all methods, and there were no significant differences of b among the three methods across years. However, visual inspection indicated that the SS differed considerably between trawling and hydroacoustics in some of the years, primarily when high densities of 0+ coregonid fishes were strongly spatially aggregated and hence caught by the trawl. Accordingly, there was no correlation between SS generated by trawling and hydroacoustics. In contrast, SS generated by SEDs and TEGs were significantly correlated, indicating reliability and reproducibility of obtaining SS by hydroacoustics. The SS estimated by TEGs revealed a positive trend of exponent b over the years since 2005, potentially reflecting the recent eutrophication of Lake Stechlin, which may lead to higher fish growth rates. We conclude that hydroacoustics may help to generate more precise SS of the pelagic fish community in our study lake than midwater trawling. However, the truthfulness of SS estimates cannot be evaluated because of the inherent difficulty in determining the true densities and sizes of fishes in lakes.