Invasion success and impact of an invasive fish, round goby, in Great Lakes tributaries

Abstract

Aim Environmental and biological characteristics interact in complex ways to determine ecosystem susceptibility to invasive species, and a greater understanding of their relative roles in invader spread and impact is needed. We evaluated relationships between environmental characteristics, biodiversity of indigenous species, and the abundance and ecological impact of an invasive fish, round goby (Neogobius melanostomus).Location Tributaries to Lake Michigan, WI, USA.Methods We assessed the distribution and abundance of round gobies and native fishes in tributaries via electrofishing. We compared fish community composition and diversity in streams with (n = 30) and without (n = 52) round gobies and examined how trends in round goby abundance from 2007 to 2010 correlated with changes in abundance of five native benthic fishes. We used redundancy analysis to determine how indigenous stream communities related to environmental characteristics and round goby abundance.Results Round goby abundance was best explained by environmental characteristics, with watershed area and temperature explaining 22.4% of the variation. Species richness and Shannon diversity only explained 6.9% of the variation in round goby abundance and only an additional 2.3% after considering environmental characteristics. Round goby abundance was not a significant predictor of fish community composition, which was best explained by seven environmental variables (30.3% of the variation). Invaded communities had significantly higher indigenous species richness than uninvaded communities (8.38 vs. 6.54). Round goby abundance was low compared with estimates from other studies, but showed an increasing trend in many tributaries (average 10.8-fold increase from 2007 to 2010). Surprisingly, there were no temporal trends in native benthic fish abundance despite increases in round goby abundance.Main conclusions Environmental characteristics favouring high fish diversity (e.g. resource availability and warm water temperature) were positively associated with round goby abundance. However, round goby density and impact are relatively low in most tributaries at present, emphasizing the importance of considering heterogeneity in an invader's abundance when assessing invasion success.

Linking the Abundance of Estuarine Fish and Crustaceans in Nearshore Waters to Shoreline Hardening and Land Cover

“…This analysis method was chosen because the significance testing best identifies species-specific shoreline type patterns, which are likely of interest to readers. However, we also evaluated the local-scale effect of shoreline type on faunal community structure as a whole using redundancy analysis (Borcard et al 1992), a multivariate approach useful for understanding patterns in community composition that has been frequently applied to fish communities (e.g., Angermeier and Winston 1999;Sharma et al 2011;Kornis et al 2013). We used redundancy analysis to determine the total amount of variation in faunal community structure explained by localscale shoreline type and to corroborate the results of the ANOVA approach (See Online Resource C for more detail).…”

The diet of reservoir perch before, during and after establishment of non-native tubenose goby

“…Further, while the consumption of gobiids by predatory fishes in general has been widely studied in North American waters (e.g. Kornis et al, 2013), it remains relatively understudied in Europe (but see Plachocki et al, 2012;Hempel et al, 2016;Mikl et al, 2017). Invasive non-native fish such as tubenose gobies have the potential to severely affect ecosystem relationships (Kornis et al, 2013) by causing changes to local food webs (Balshine et al, 2005;Copp et al, 2005;Johnson et al, 2005).…”

What do we really know about the impacts of one of the 100 worst invaders in Europe? A reality check

“…However, the impact of round goby abundance on logperch abundance in Hamilton Harbour, Lake Ontario remains elusive (Balshine et al 2005). No impact on logperch abundance has been found in catchments of Lake Michigan (Kornis et al 2013).…”

“…Decision makers prioritize management efforts on those species that are expected to have the most adverse impact (Simberloff 2003). Because not all potentially harmful introductions can be simultaneously managed, decision makers have to ''maximize the trade-off between accuracy and utility'' of a management (Kornis et al 2013).…”