奥奈达湖:管理生态系统及其渔业的长期动态

第19章:评估双冠鸬鹚对纽约奥奈达湖白眼和黄鲈种群的影响

杰里米·t·h·科尔曼、罗宾·l·德布鲁因、拉斯·g·鲁斯塔姆、詹姆斯·r·杰克逊、安东尼·j·范德瓦尔克、托马斯·e·布鲁金、康妮·m·亚当斯和米洛·e·里士满

doi:https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874431.ch19

已知顶级捕食者会影响水生系统的群落结构(Carpenter et al. 1985;McQueen et al. 1989)，但建立观察到的种群水平变化背后的因果关系可能很困难，特别是在大型复杂系统中。在20世纪80年代和90年代，鸬鹚数量的稳步增长引起了人们对由此导致的对北美和欧洲重要的经济野生鱼类种群的捕食的有害影响的担忧(见Nettleship和Duffy 1995年编辑的卷;Cowx 2003;van Eerden et al. 2011)。然而，由于水生食物网的复杂性、研究系统中物种组合的多样性、鸬鹚猎物选择的灵活性以及普遍缺乏合适的基线数据，对鸬鹚对有价值鱼类种群影响的本质的明确理解一直是难以捉摸的(Wires 2014)。虽然一些作者报告了鸬鹚对鱼类种群的负面影响(Birt et al. 1987;伯内特等，2002;Lantry等，2002;Rudstam等人，2004; Winfield et al. 2005; Fielder 2010a; Dorr et al. 2012), others found no impact on fish species of sport or commercial value (Trapp et al. 1999; Wires et al. 2001; Engström 2001; Diana et al. 2006). A major criticism of nearly all studies of cormorant-fish interactions is that the investigators fail to adequately relate cormorant prey consumption to population level impacts on fish, mostly due to a lack of comprehensive fish data. Comprehensive knowledge of prey populations is a critical element to the study of the predator impacts, and attempts to understand complex species interactions are greatly facilitated by long-term trends that integrate short-term fluctuations associated with population stochasticity (Mills and Forney 1988; Brown et al. 2001). A robust analysis of cormorant impacts on fish populations is therefore facilitated by long-term fish population data, as well as a comprehensive record of additional biotic and abiotic factors that also can affect fish population dynamics in the system. One of the few locations in North America with such comprehensive data is Oneida Lake, New York.