Meeting Abstract
Invasive species are presenting themselves as a threat to biodiversity as the planet experiences rising temperatures and other forms of rapid environmental change. Thus, it is important to understand how native populations evolve in response to these novel selection pressures if we are to make conservation efforts more effective. Northern pike are an invasive species spreading from the central part of Alaska into the southcentral lowlands. This spread is introducing novel predation pressures to native freshwater threespine stickleback populations, which inhabit many of the freshwater lakes that cover southcentral Alaska. Studying the effects invasive pike have on stickleback populations provides us with a valuable opportunity to examine the effects invasive species have on the evolutionary trajectory of native species, in replicate. Past data suggests that morphological changes that correlated to pike invasion include increases in both pelvic and dorsal spine length and increases in the number of lateral plates. Additionally, a stickleback population dealing with invasive pike displayed decreases in body depth, which may correlate to a change in habitat. However, more data are needed to establish if these changes are indicative of a shared response in all stickleback populations dealing with invasive pike. Here we look to determine whether these few results are general to stickleback, or whether lake-specific trends emerge, by examining morphological changes in additional populations.
