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Food web efficiency differs between humic and clear water lake communities in response to nutrients and light

  • Ecosystem ecology - Original research
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Abstract

This study demonstrates that clear and humic freshwater pelagic communities respond differently to the same environmental stressors, i.e. nutrient and light availability. Thus, effects on humic communities cannot be generalized from existing knowledge about these environmental stressors on clear water communities. Small humic lakes are the most numerous type of lake in the boreal zone, but little is known about how these lakes will respond to increased inflows of nutrients and terrestrial dissolved organic C (t-DOC) due to climate change and increased human impacts. Therefore, we compared the effects of nutrient addition and light availability on pelagic humic and clear water lake communities in a mesocosm experiment. When nutrients were added, phytoplankton production (PPr) increased in both communities, but pelagic energy mobilization (PEM) and bacterial production (BP) only increased in the humic community. At low light conditions, the addition of nutrients led to increased PPr only in the humic community, suggesting that, in contrast to the clear water community, humic phytoplankton were already adapted to lower ambient light levels. Low light significantly reduced PPr and PEM in the clear water community, but without reducing total zooplankton production, which resulted in a doubling of food web efficiency (FWE = total zooplankton production/PEM). However, total zooplankton production was not correlated with PEM, PPr, BP, PPr:BP or C:nutrient stoichiometry for either community type. Therefore, other factors such as food chain length, food quality, ultra-violet radiation or duration of the experiment, must have determined total zooplankton production and ultimately FWE.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Anneli Lagesson and Elsa Nilsson for help in the field and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. This study was part of the Lake Ecosystem Response to Environmental Change (LEREC) and was supported with grants from the Wallenberg foundation and the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    C. L. Faithfull, P. Mathisen, A. Wenzel & A. K. Bergström

  2. Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden

    T. Vrede

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  1. C. L. Faithfull
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  2. P. Mathisen
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  3. A. Wenzel
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  4. A. K. Bergström
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Correspondence to C. L. Faithfull.

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Communicated by Ulrich Sommer.

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Faithfull, C.L., Mathisen, P., Wenzel, A. et al. Food web efficiency differs between humic and clear water lake communities in response to nutrients and light. Oecologia 177, 823–835 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3132-2

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