Warming-driven shifts in ecological control of fish communities in a large northern Chinese lake over 66 years

Abstract

Warming, land-use change, and habitat loss are three major threats to aquatic biodiversity worldwide under the influences of anthropogenic disturbances. Positive feedback between warming and bottom-up regulation may cause irreversible ecological regime shifts. Threshold dynamics of interspecific interactions have been rarely studied in freshwater fish communities using threshold community models. Here we use 66 years (1950-2015) of data to link four ecological regime shifts of 9-species fish communities to climatic and land use changes in Lake Hulun, the largest freshwater lake of Northern China. Overfishing caused the collapse of piscivorous fish populations and an ecological regime shift of Lake Hulun in the late 1950s. The first recorded algal bloom of Lake Hulun took place in 1986, with accelerated warming and rapid increases in livestock grazing. The dominance of planktivorous minnow populations reduced fish biodiversity in a nonlinear, threshold manner when annual mean ambient temperature was >0.12 °C. Multivariate environmental vector regression demonstrated that warming, eutrophication, and water-storage reduction (i.e., habitat loss) were related to three ecological regime shifts of Lake Hulun from 1960 to 2015. Multivariate autoregressive models (MAR) did not detect predation by piscivorous fish in Lake Hulun after 1960. Threshold MAR models indicated that dominant minnow populations and other prey fish populations switched from top-down to bottom-up control during the 1980s. Sustained positive feedback between warming, the dominance of planktivorous fish populations, and bottom-up regulation caused predator-prey role reversal, and probably resulted in three regime shifts of Lake Hulun over 56 years. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of ecological regime shifts in Hulun Lake fish communities, and has potential implications for fish species living in similar environments that are subject to global warming, land-use changes, and overfishing.

Keywords: Climate change; Fish community; Habitat loss; Interspecific interaction; Land-use change; Long-term dynamics; Overfishing.