Meeting Abstract
Invasive species have negative ecological and economic consequences for their invaded ecosystems and societies. The ability of invasive species to adapt to environmental conditions, especially temperature, has motivated research investigating the effects of environmental temperature on organismal performance. The effects of temperature on feeding performance in invasive fishes have been determined by focusing exclusively on predator-response to temperature. However, temperature-induced changes in physical properties of water (e.g., viscosity) and physiological systems (e.g., contractile properties of muscles) affect both predator and prey. This study is the first to investigate the effects of environmental temperature on the relationship between invasive and native prey. At a given temperature, distance traveled by predator toward prey (i.e., Ram-feeding) was greater than distance traveled by prey toward the predator’s mouth (i.e., Suction-feeding) during prey-capture. However, the magnitude of ram-feeding relative to suction-feeding (i.e., Ram-Suction Index (RSI) values) increased as water temperature became warmer. Temperature sensitivity (Q10-values) of both predator and prey declined with increasing temperature. These results indicate that the responses of both invasive-predator and native-prey have to be addressed by ecologists and conservation biologists in investigating the consequences of environmental temperature for the community dynamics and management of invaded ecosystems. Furthermore, the ability of invasive fishes to modulate their feeding performance in response to temperature (i.e., temperature sensitive RSI) enables them to successfully expand their invasive-range of distribution as higher latitude ecosystems experience higher temperatures as a consequence of global warming and climate change.
