Preprint Article Version 2 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Tracing the Food Web of Changing Arctic Ocean: Trophic Status of Highly Abundant Fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus (L.), in the White Sea Recovered Using Stomach Content and Stable Isotope Analyses

Anna S. Genelt-Yanovskaya
* ORCID logo ,
Natalia V. Polyakova
,
Mikhail V. Ivanov
,
Ekaterina V. Nadtochii
,
Tatiana S. Ivanova
,
Evgeny A. Genelt-Yanovskiy
ORCID logo ,
Alexei V. Tiunov
,
Dmitry L. Lajus
Version 1 : Received: 15 September 2022 / Approved: 16 September 2022 / Online: 16 September 2022 (10:04:36 CEST)
Version 2 : Received: 28 October 2022 / Approved: 31 October 2022 / Online: 31 October 2022 (02:13:07 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Genelt-Yanovskaya, A.S.; Polyakova, N.V.; Ivanov, M.V.; Nadtochii, E.V.; Ivanova, T.S.; Genelt-Yanovskiy, E.A.; Tiunov, A.V.; Lajus, D.L. Tracing the Food Web of Changing Arctic Ocean: Trophic Status of Highly Abundant Fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus (L.), in the White Sea Recovered Using Stomach Content and Stable Isotope Analyses. Diversity 2022, 14, 955. Genelt-Yanovskaya, A.S.; Polyakova, N.V.; Ivanov, M.V.; Nadtochii, E.V.; Ivanova, T.S.; Genelt-Yanovskiy, E.A.; Tiunov, A.V.; Lajus, D.L. Tracing the Food Web of Changing Arctic Ocean: Trophic Status of Highly Abundant Fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus (L.), in the White Sea Recovered Using Stomach Content and Stable Isotope Analyses. Diversity 2022, 14, 955.

Abstract

Studies of dietary preferences of migratory species are of great importance as these species connect food webs of habitats across the migration route and thus represent trophic relationships between the spatially disjointed communities. Here we describe dietary preferences of threespine stickleback G. aculeatus in the White Sea during the spawning season using stable isotope and stomach content analyses. Both analyses indicated that during the spawning season, when sticklebacks spend most of the time in the inshore, their diet significantly consist of benthic species in contrast to the start of the spawning season when fishes migrating from the offshore are feeding on zooplankton. Also, we show that stickleback eggs contribute greatly to the diet of both male and female fishes. Using Bayesian mixing modelling we show that dietary preferences in females were broader than in males, and more variable during the spawning season. Males fed on eggs almost while guarding their nests. Both stomach contents and isotope signatures demonstrate that by the end of the spawning season sticklebacks again increase consumption of plankton, and isotope analysis proved to be more reliable tool to trace this change than stomach content analysis. Our results show that stable isotope and stomach content analyses well supplement each other in understanding of seasonal changes in dietary composition of stickleback.

Keywords

threespine stickleback; Gasterosteus aculeatus; stomach content analysis; stable isotope analysis; fish diet; the White Sea; boreal fish; Subarctic

Subject

Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Comments (1)

Comment 1
Received: 31 October 2022
Commenter: Anna Genelt-Yanovskaya
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: Author
Comment: This is an updated version of the manuscript that has been re-submitted for review to DIVERSITY after the first round of peer-reviewing. 
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