Invading up the food web? Invasive fish in the southeastern Mediterranean Sea

Menachem Goren, Bella S. Galil, Arik Diamant, Nir Stern, Ya'arit Levitt-Barmats

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The invasion of Indo-Pacific fish through the Suez Canal has dramatically altered the diversity of fish assemblages on the upper shelf of the southeastern Mediterranean. Yet, their role in the trophodynamics of the novel assemblages has been largely overlooked. In the present study, we investigated the impacts of the alien fish species on the structure of the food web along the Israeli upper shelf soft bottoms, as expressed by their biomass relative abundance, and by comparing the mean and distribution patterns of the trophic levels among the aliens and the local native species. Our study, based on examination of more than 200,000 fishes belonging to 111 species, revealed that at 20-m alien species comprised 54 % of all sampled individuals while comprising 70 % of the biomass; at 40 the alien species comprised 67 % of all sampled individuals and 45 % of the biomass. Overall, the mean weighted trophic level of the aliens was 3.74, while that of the natives was 3.39. Depth was found as an important factor affecting the trophic levels of both native and alien species. At a depth of 20 m, the combined mean weighted trophic level (natives + aliens) was slightly higher than at 40 m (3.61 and 3.56, respectively), although depth impact differed between aliens and natives. Between a depth of 20 and 40 m, the mean weighted trophic level of aliens increased from 3.65 to 3.85, while that of the natives decreased from 3.54 to 3.33. These findings indicate that the local food webs have gone through significant modification, with a trend of increasing dominance of alien fish.

Original languageEnglish
Article number180
JournalMarine Biology
Volume163
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Aug 2016
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors are deeply grateful to Captain Levi Ornoy, who ably ran the trawler ‘Moti’; thanks to N. Paz for editing the manuscript and I. Goren for helping with the statistical analysis. This research was funded by the Porter School of Environmental Studies, Tel Aviv University, through funding from the Italian Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea, R&D Project (2008) (received by M.G., B.S.G. and A.D.) and by the Israel Taxonomy Initiative (2010) (received by M.G.).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
  • Aquatic Science
  • Ecology

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