A century of intermittent eco-evolutionary feedbacks resulted in novel trait combinations in invasive Great Lakes alewives ().

Species introductions provide opportunities to quantify rates and patterns of evolutionary change in response to novel environments. Alewives () are native to the East Coast of North America where they ascend coastal rivers to spawn in lakes and then return to the ocean. Some populations have become landlocked within the last 350 years and diverged phenotypically from their ancestral marine population.

Benthic habitat is an integral part of freshwater ecology.

Diel vertical migration (DVM) is common in aquatic organisms. The trade-off between reduced predation risk in deeper, darker waters during the day and increased foraging opportunities closer to the surface at night is a leading hypothesis for DVM behaviour.Diel vertical migration behaviour has dominated research and assessment frameworks for , an omnivorous mid-trophic level macroinvertebrate that exhibits strong DVM between benthic and pelagic habitats and plays key roles in many deep lake ecosystems.

Life history constraints explain negative relationship between fish productivity and dissolved organic carbon in lakes.

Resource availability constrains the life history strategies available to organisms and may thereby limit population growth rates and productivity. We used this conceptual framework to explore the mechanisms driving recently reported negative relationships between fish productivity and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in lakes. We studied populations of bluegill () in a set of lakes with DOC concentrations ranging from 3 to 24 mg/L; previous work has demonstrated that primary and secondary productivity of food webs is negatively related to DOC concentration across this gradient.

Social-ecological outcomes in recreational fisheries: the interaction of lakeshore development and stocking.

Many ecosystems continue to experience rapid transformations due to processes like land use change and resource extraction. A systems approach to maintaining natural resources focuses on how interactions and feedbacks among components of complex social-ecological systems generate social and ecological outcomes. In recreational fisheries, residential shoreline development and fish stocking are two widespread human behaviors that influence fisheries, yet emergent social-ecological outcomes from these potentially interacting behaviors remain under explored.

Experimental whole-lake increase of dissolved organic carbon concentration produces unexpected increase in crustacean zooplankton density.

The observed pattern of lake browning, or increased terrestrial dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration, across the northern hemisphere has amplified the importance of understanding how consumer productivity varies with DOC concentration. Results from comparative studies suggest these increased DOC concentrations may reduce crustacean zooplankton productivity due to reductions in resource quality and volume of suitable habitat. Although these spatial comparisons provide an expectation for the response of zooplankton productivity as DOC concentration increases, we still have an incomplete understanding of how zooplankton respond to temporal increases in DOC concentration within a single system.

Stable isotope turnover and half-life in animal tissues: a literature synthesis.

Stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur are used as ecological tracers for a variety of applications, such as studies of animal migrations, energy sources, and food web pathways. Yet uncertainty relating to the time period integrated by isotopic measurement of animal tissues can confound the interpretation of isotopic data. There have been a large number of experimental isotopic diet shift studies aimed at quantifying animal tissue isotopic turnover rate λ (%·day(-1), often expressed as isotopic half-life, ln(2)/λ, days).

Terrestrial carbon is a resource, but not a subsidy, for lake zooplankton.

Inputs of terrestrial organic carbon (t-OC) into lakes are often considered a resource subsidy for aquatic consumer production. Although there is evidence that terrestrial carbon can be incorporated into the tissues of aquatic consumers, its ability to enhance consumer production has been debated. Our research aims to evaluate the net effect of t-OC input on zooplankton.

The influence of environmental water on the hydrogen stable isotope ratio in aquatic consumers.

Aquatic food webs are subsidized by allochthonous resources but the utilization of these resources by consumers can be difficult to quantify. Stable isotope ratios of hydrogen (deuterium:hydrogen; deltaD) potentially distinguish allochthonous inputs because deltaD differs between terrestrial and aquatic primary producers. However, application of this tracer is limited by uncertainties regarding the trophic fractionation of deltaD and the contributions of H from environmental water (often called "dietary water") to consumer tissue H.