Impact of Submerged Macrophytes on Fish-Zooplankton Interactions in Lakes

Abstract

Fish have a major structuring impact on the Zooplankton communities in lakes (Hrbacek et al., 1961; Brooks and Dodson, 1965) that may cascade to the lower trophic levels and chemical environment (Carpenter et al., 1985; Carpenter and Kitchell, 1993). Ample evidence is available from enclosure experiments (e.g., Christoffersen et al., 1993), whole-lake experiments (e.g., Shapiro et al., 1975; Benndorf, 1987; Gulati et al., 1990; Carpenter and Kitchell, 1993), and empirical analyses (Jeppesen et al., 1990, 1997). More recently, it has become evident that 0+ fish may play a key role in Zooplankton population dynamics (Cryer et al., 1986; Mills et al., 1987), and some studies suggest that fish larvae are responsible for the midsummer decline in Zooplankton (Luecke et al., 1990; Jeppesen et al., 1997), a phenomenon that is often attributed to increased density of inedible phytoplankton such as cyanobacteria (e.g., De Bernardi and Guisanni, 1990). Whole-lake (Sondergaard et al., 1997) and enclosure (He and Wright, 1992) experiments support the structuring role of 0+ fish. How the importance of top-down control of Zooplankton by fish varies along a trophic gradient is debated extensively. McQueen et al. (1986) suggested that the cascading effect of zooplank-tivorous fish is stronger in oligotrophic lakes than in eutrophic lakes, but a growing body of literature argues that the cascading effect of fish is greater in eutrophic and hypertrophic lakes with respect to the food web in the classic sense