History and heroes: the thermal niche of fishes and long-term lake ice dynamics

Abstract

These perspectives on climate change come largely from two views, i.e. that of a fish and fisheries ecologist with an autecological interest and that of a limnologist interested in long-term dynamics and change. Ideas about the thermal niche evolved from the late F. E. J. Fry's (University of Toronto) paradigm of fish response to environmental factors and the late G. Evelyn Hutchinson's (Yale University) formalization of the niche concept. In contrast, ideas about climatic change and variability have been shaped by long-term observation records from lakes around the northern hemisphere. The history of each set of ideas, i.e. the thermal niche of fishes and learning from nature's long-term dynamics, is briefly reviewed in the context of climatic change.