Subsidy accessibility drives asymmetric food web responses.
Ecology
; 103(12): e3817, 2022 12.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35852817
ABSTRACT
Global change is fundamentally altering flows of natural and anthropogenic subsidies across space and time. After a pointed call for research on subsidies in the 1990s, an industry of empirical work has documented the ubiquitous role subsidies play in ecosystem structure, stability, and function. Here, we argue that physical constraints (e.g., water temperature) and species traits can govern a species' accessibility to resource subsidies, which has been largely overlooked in the subsidy literature. We examined the input of a high-quality, point-source anthropogenic subsidy (aquaculture feed) into a recipient freshwater lake food web. Using a combined bio-tracer approach, we detect a gradient in accessibility of the anthropogenic subsidy within the surrounding food web driven by the thermal preferences of three constituent species, effectively rewiring the recipient lake food web. Because aquaculture is predicted to increase significantly in coming decades to support growing human populations, and global change is altering temperature regimes, then this form of food web alteration may be expected to occur frequently. We argue that subsidy accessibility is a key characteristic of recipient food web interactions that must be considered when trying to understand the impacts of subsidies on ecosystem stability and function under continued global change.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Ecosistema
/
Cadena Alimentaria
Tipo de estudio:
Prognostic_studies
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Ecology
Año:
2022
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Canadá