Abstract
Human activities cause many changes in wildlife populations, including phenotypic shifts that represent adaptations to new conditions and influence population dynamics, diversity, and persistence. Although many examples of phenotypic adjustment to anthropogenic disturbance exist, we rarely know the extent to which these changes result from genetic evolution or phenotypic plasticity. Furthermore, our understanding of how whole-organism performance changes as a result of habitat alteration is very limited. We tested how urbanization, an important type of global disturbance, influences fish swimming performance in urban streams. Because urban streams have higher water velocities during rain events than rural streams, we tested for increased steady-swimming performance in fish from urbanized watersheds. Across ten populations of wild-caught Creek Chub (Semotilus atromaculatus), we found that fish from streams in more urbanized areas exhibited a longer propulsive wavelength and a lower tailbeat frequency, expending lower levels of hydromechanical power during steady swimming. In a laboratory experiment, we reared individuals collected as fry from four populations with different urbanization histories, and found evidence for genetically based differences in swimming kinematics. Laboratory-reared fish derived from urbanized populations exhibited higher locomotor efficiency, matching predictions for adaptation to urban environments. We exposed laboratory-reared Creek Chub from urban and rural populations to artificially increased water velocity for four months and observed that only some populations exhibited plasticity. Urban populations may have lost maladaptive, velocity-induced plasticity in locomotor efficiency that is still present in rural populations. Evolutionary change in freshwater species may represent a widespread yet unrecognized consequence of anthropogenic activity.
Highlights
Human impacts on the environment present one of the greatest challenges for conservation worldwide (Young et al, 2005; Worm et al, 2009; Barbier, 2011)
We found that the steady-swimming performance of Creek Chub differs with stream urbanization, and that some aspects of performance in some populations show velocity-induced plasticity, most of the differences between populations appear to reflect genetic differentiation, controlled breeding experiments would be necessary to confirm this
Wild-caught Creek Chub from rural streams expended more hydromechanical power during steady swimming than urban fish swimming at the same speed, and patterns in laboratoryraised fish suggest a genetic basis to these differences as a rural population still showed lower steady-swimming efficiency than populations from urbanized streams
Summary
Human impacts on the environment present one of the greatest challenges for conservation worldwide (Young et al, 2005; Worm et al, 2009; Barbier, 2011). We know of some evolutionary responses to urbanization in terrestrial species, we know practically nothing about how stream species respond evolutionarily to the environmental changes caused by urbanization (Kern and Langerhans, 2018). This is surprising since much attention has been devoted to urban stream degradation (the “urban stream syndrome”) and other effects of human development on aquatic ecosystems (Paul and Meyer, 2001; Wenger et al, 2009; Knouft and Chu, 2015). It is becoming clear that our knowledge of human-induced ecological impacts in streams has far outpaced our needed understanding of evolutionary impacts
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