Search results for "ravintoverkot"

A New Method to Reconstruct Quantitative Food Webs and Nutrient Flows from Isotope Tracer Addition Experiments

2020

Understanding how nutrients flow through food webs is central in ecosystem ecology. Tracer addition experiments are powerful tools to reconstruct nutrient flows by adding an isotopically enriched element into an ecosystem and tracking its fate through time. Historically, the design and analysis of tracer studies have varied widely, ranging from descriptive studies to modeling approaches of varying complexity. Increasingly, isotope tracer data are being used to compare ecosystems and analyze experimental manipulations. Currently, a formal statistical framework for analyzing such experiments is lacking, making it impossible to calculate the estimation errors associated with the model fit, the…

Marine food web perspective to fisheries-induced evolution

2021

Fisheries exploitation can cause genetic changes in heritable traits of targeted stocks. The direction of selective pressure forced by harvest acts typically in reverse to natural selection and selects for explicit life-histories, usually for younger and smaller spawners with deprived spawning potential. While the consequences that such selection might have on the populational dynamics of a single species are well emphasised, we are just beginning to perceive the variety and severity of its propagating effects within the entire marine food webs and ecosystems. Here, we highlight the potential pathways in which fishing-induced evolution, driven by size-selective fishing, might resonate throu…

Lowered nutritional quality of prey decrease the growth and biomolecule content of rainbow trout fry

2022

Diet quality is crucial for the development of offspring. Here, we examined how the nutritional quality of prey affects somatic growth and the lipid, carbohydrate, protein, amino acid, and polyunsaturated fatty acid content of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) fry using a three-trophic-level experimental setup. Diets differed especially in their content of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which are physiologically essential polyunsaturated fatty acids for a fish fry. Trout were fed with an artificial diet (fish feed, DHA-rich), marine zooplankton diet (krill/Mysis, DHA-rich), or freshwater zooplankton diet (Daphnia, Cladocera, DHA-deficient). The Daphnia were gr…

Littoral energy pathways in highly humic boreal lakes

2017

Littoral zones in lakes are among the most productive habitats in the world, but have been seriously understudied, as most limnological studies have concerned only pelagic habitats. The likely importance of littoral zones in clear lakes is widely acknowledged, but in contrast their role in dystrophic humic lakes has generally been assumed to be minor. In this thesis, littoral importance in whole-lake metabolism was studied in small and highly humic lakes in Southern Finland, where Lake Mekkojärvi was the principal study lake. Primary production (PP) measurements revealed that littoral periphyton, growing on surrounding aquatic vegetation, can dominate the whole-lake PP, and the highly autot…

Carbon control of bacterioplankton in subarctic lakes and ponds

2015

A Bayesian stable isotope mixing model for coping with multiple isotopes, multiple trophic steps and small sample sizes

2022

We introduce a Bayesian stable isotope mixing model for estimating the relative contributions of different dietary components to the tissues of consumers within food webs. The model is implemented with the probabilistic programming language Stan. The model incorporates isotopes of multiple elements (e.g. C, N, H) for two trophic levels, when the structure of the food web is known. In addition, the model allows inclusion of latent trophic levels (i.e. for which no empirical data are available) intermediate between sources and measured consumers. Running the model in simulations driven by a real dataset from Finnish lakes, we tested the sensitivity of the posterior distributions by altering c…

Littoral-pelagic zone food web interactions in fishless, highly humic Lake Mekkojärvi

2007

Harmaahylkeen (Halichoerus grypus) ravinto eri osissa pohjoista Itämerta

2013

Itämeren harmaahylkeiden (Halichoerus grypus) yksilömäärien kasvu viime vuosikymmeninä on aiheuttanut ristiriitoja ammattikalastajien ja hylkeiden välille. Hylkeiden on todettu muun muassa vahingoittavan pyydyksiä ja syövän kalastajille arvokasta saalista myös pyydyksistä, kuten lohta (Salmo salar), sekä karkottavan kalaparvia kalastusalueiden ulkopuolelle. Toisaalta harmaahylkeille uhkana on hukkuminen pyydyksiin sekä lisääntynyt häirintä kalastajien ja meriliikenteen toimesta. Näiden ristiriitojen myötä kiinnostus hylkeiden ravinnosta on lisääntynyt. Hylkeiden ravinnonkäyttöä on perinteisesti tutkittu ruoansulatuskanavan sisällöstä. Tämän menetelmän ongelmana on, että saalislajien sulamat…

Return of the Apex Predator : How Brown Trout (Salmo trutta) Re-Establishment Shapes an Ecosystem

2021

Re-establishment of a declined apex predator fish species in a lake ecosystem may have dramatic effects on other fish and plankton community already inhabiting the ecosystem. We studied mechanistically potential impacts of re-establishment of the brown trout (Salmo trutta) in the west-central European Lake Constance focusing on two commercially important fish species: whitefish and Eurasian perch. We compared simulation model outputs from two versions of an allometric trophic network model for Lake Constance, one with and one without the trout as the apex predator. The re-establishment of the declined brown trout reduced the perch population directly by predation and indirectly by increased…

Increasing temperature and productivity change biomass, trophic pyramids and community‐level omega‐3 fatty acid content in subarctic lake food webs

2021

Climate change in the Arctic is outpacing the global average and land-use is intensifying due to exploitation of previously inaccessible or unprofitable natural resources. A comprehensive understanding of how the joint effects of changing climate and productivity modify lake food web structure, biomass, trophic pyramid shape and abundance of physiologically essential biomolecules (omega-3 fatty acids) in the biotic community is lacking. We conducted a space-for-time study in 20 subarctic lakes spanning a climatic (+3.2 degrees C and precipitation: +30%) and chemical (dissolved organic carbon: +10 mg/L, total phosphorus: +45 mu g/L and total nitrogen: +1,000 mu g/L) gradient to test how temp…