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Individual diet and habitat specialisation are widespread in animal taxa and often related to levels of predation and competition. Mobile consumers such as predatory fish can stabilise lake food webs by ranging over a larger area than their prey, thereby switching between habitats. Although, this switching assumes that the predator has equal preference for the available prey, individual diet specialisation and morphological adaptations to different habitats could potentially prevent individuals from switching between habitats. In this study, we assessed the niche width and individual specialisation in Eurasian perch Perca fluviatilis in response to a shift in habitat use by manipulating the ability for this top predator to couple habitats. We ran an eight weeks pond experiment, to test the effect of habitat switching on diet and morphological specialisations. We show that habitat coupling influenced individual diet specialisation and niche use in expected directions where specialisation increased with decreasing habitat switching. In contrast to expectations, the morphological variation decreased with increasing diet specialisation. Our results expand on previous work and suggest that individual specialisation and niche width can impact the ability of mobile predators to couple habitats. Furthermore, it shows the importance of individual specialisations in relation to habitat coupling.

The turnover and distribution of energy and nutrients in food webs is influenced by consumer stoichiometry. Although the stoichiometry of heterotrophs is generally considered to vary only little, t ...

It has been hypothesized that inter-specific competition will reduce species niche utilization and drive morphological evolution in character displacement. In the absence of a competitor, intra-specific competition may favor an expansion of the species niche and drive morphological evolution in character release. Despite of this theoretical framework, we sometimes find potential competitor species using the same niche range without any partitioning in niche. We used a database on test fishing in Sweden to evaluate the factors (inter- and intraspecific competition, predation, and abiotic factors) that could influence habitat choice of two competitor species. The pattern from the database shows that the occurrence of perch and roach occupying both littoral and pelagic habitats of lakes in Sweden is a general phenomenon. Furthermore, the results from the database suggest that this pattern is due to intra-specific competition rather than inter-specific competition or predation. In a field study, we estimated the morphological variation in perch and roach and found that, individuals of both species caught in the littoral zone were more deeper bodied compared to individuals caught in the pelagic zone. Pelagic perch fed more on zooplankton compared to littoral perch, independent of size, whereas the littoral perch had more macroinvertebrates and fish in their diet. Pelagic roach fed more on zooplankton compared to littoral roach, whereas littoral individuals fed more on plant material. Furthermore, we sampled littoral and pelagic fish from another lake to evaluate the generality of our first results and found the same habitat associated morphology in both perch and roach. The results show a consistent multi-species morphological separation in the littoral and pelagic habitats. This study suggests that intra-specific competition is possibly more important than inter-specific competition for the morphological pattern in the perch-roach system.

Resource competition has been hypothesized to be important in driving divergence by natural selection. The effect of competition on morphological divergence and plasticity has however rarely been investigated. Since low growth rates might constrain morphological modulation and individual growth rates usually are negatively related to the intensity of competition, there might be a connection between competition, growth rate and morphological divergence. We performed an aquarium experiment with young-of-the-year Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis L.) to investigate how individual growth rate affected morphological plasticity induced by contrasting habitat treatments. Furthermore, in a field study of 10 lakes we also related the degree of morphological differentiation between habitats to the intraspecific competitior biomass. In the aquarium experiment we found that morphological plasticity was growth rate dependent in that morphological differentiation between the habitat treatments was confined to high individual growth rates. In the field study we found that morphological differentiation between habitats decreased with increasing intraspecific competitior biomass. Since plasticity is hypothesized to be important in divergence and intraspecific biomass could serve as a proxy for the level of competition, we suggest that our results indicate that morphological divergence might be constrained during periods of intense intraspecific competition due to low growth rates. A possible scenario is that at low growth rates all energy available is used for metabolic maintenance and no surplus energy is therefore available for morphological modulation.

The stoichiometry of trophic interactions has mainly been studied in simple consumer–prey systems, whereas natural systems often harbour complex food webs with abundant indirect effects. We manipul ...

The work in this thesis deals with the ecology and evolution of adaptive individual variation. Ecologists have long used niche theory to describe the ecology of a species as a whole, treating conspecific individuals as ecological equivalent. During recent years, research about individual variation in diet and morphology has gained interest in adaptive radiations and ecological speciation. Such variation among individual niche use may have important conservation implications as well as ecological and evolutionary implications. However, up to date we know very little about the extension of this phenomenon in natural populations and the mechanisms behind it.The results in this thesis show that the extension of individual diet specialization is widely spread throughout the animal kingdom. The variation in diet is mainly correlated to morphological variation but not always. Furthermore, this variation in diet and morphology among individuals could be both genetically determined and environmentally induced and it mainly comes from trade-offs in foraging efficiency between different prey types. The results from a number of studies of perch also show that individual perch differ in morphology and diet depending on habitat, where littoral perch has a deeper body compared to pelagic perch. This difference in morphology corresponds to functional expectations and is related to foraging efficiency trade-offs between foraging in the littoral and pelagic zone of a lake. The variation in morphology in perch is mainly due to phenotypic plasticity but there are also small genetic differences between the littoral and pelagic perch. Two separate studies show that both predation and competition may be important mechanism for the variation in morphology and diet in perch.In conclusion, the results in this thesis show that individual variation in diet and habitat choice is a common phenomenon with lots of ecological and evolutionary implications. However, there are many mechanisms involved in this phenomenon on which we are just about to start learning more about, and only further research in this area will give us the full insight.

This study examined the effects of multiple predators on size-specific behavior and mortality of two species of anuran larvae. Particularly. we focused on how trail changes in predators and prey may be transmitted to other species in the food web. In labo

PREDATORY EFFICIENCY AND PREY SELECTION - INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PIKE ESOX-LUCIUS, LUCIUS, PERCH PERCA-FLUVIATILIS AND RUDD SCARDINUS-ERYTHROPHTHALMUS