How Will Climate Warming Affect Non-Native Pumpkinseed Lepomis gibbosus Populations in the U.K.?

PLoS One. 2015 Aug 24;10(8):e0135482. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135482. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Of the non-native fishes introduced to the U.K., the pumpkinseed is one of six species predicted to benefit from the forecasted climate warming conditions. To demonstrate the potential response of adults and their progeny to a water temperature increase, investigations of parental pumpkinseed acclimatization, reproduction and YOY over-wintering were carried out in outdoor experimental ponds under ambient and elevated water temperature regimes. No temperature effects were observed on either adult survivorship and growth, and none of the assessed reproductive activity variables (total spawning time, spawning season length, number of spawning bouts) appeared to be responsible for the large differences observed in progeny number and biomass. However, it was demonstrated in a previous study [Zięba G. et al., 2010] that adults in the heated ponds began spawning earlier than those of the ambient ponds. Ambient ponds produced 2.8× more progeny than the heated ponds, but these progeny were significantly smaller, probably due to their late hatching date, and subsequently suffered very high mortality over the first winter. Pumpkinseed in the U.K. will clearly benefit from climate warming through earlier seasonal reproduction, resulting in larger progeny going into winter, and as a result, higher over-winter survivorship would be expected relative to that which occurs under the present climatic regime.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acclimatization / physiology
  • Animals
  • Climate Change*
  • Fishes
  • Introduced Species*
  • Perciformes / physiology*
  • Ponds
  • Reproduction / physiology
  • Temperature
  • United Kingdom

Grants and funding

This study, which is a product of an international network initiated under a NATO Science Programme ‘Collaborative Linkage Grant’ awarded to GHC, was funded jointly by a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship and National Science Centre, Poland, decision No DEC-2011/01/D/NZ8/01807 (to GZ) and the UK Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). The participation of MGF was co-funded by Defra and a National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant.