Niche expansion in a resilient endemic species following introduction of a novel top predator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Introduced species can have profound direct ecological impacts on native species, yet their potential indirect effects remain relatively unexplored. For instance, introduced predators may directly affect some native species via predation, which may in turn have indirect consequences for other species that are released from competition. We explore this possibility in East Africa's Lake Victoria basin, where the introduction of the predatory Nile perch, Lates niloticus, in the 1950s and 60s contributed to the overall or local extinction of hundreds of native fish by the 1980s. We ask whether this dramatic change in assemblage composition has led to competitive release and niche expansion in Rastrineobola argentea, a resilient native cyprinid that has thrived in this highly perturbed ecosystem. To address this question, we compare the trophic ecology of R. argentea before (1966) and after (2011) the introduction of the Nile perch in Lake Victoria; and across eight satellite lakes that differ in their history of Nile perch invasion. Using this combination of spatial and temporal comparisons, we test for increases in dietary niche breadth (niche expansion) and changes in the level of individual specialisation of R. argentea in invaded versus uninvaded contexts. In our historical comparison, we find good evidence for dietary niche expansion and an increase in interindividual diet variation in R. argentea over time. Across lakes, however, strong bottom‐up effects (i.e. variation in prey availability) appear to obscure any potential top‐down effects of the Nile perch introduction on the trophic ecology of R. argentea. Overall, we find substantial temporal and spatial variation in the diet and niche breadth of R. argentea, but the underlying drivers remain uncertain, given the complexity of both anthropogenic and natural ecological changes in Lake Victoria over the past century. Understanding both the direct and indirect impacts of introduced species is challenging, but important for successful long‐term management of human‐altered ecosystems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".