The lakes in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains historically didn’t contain fish, but stocking of trout that began in the early 1900s has created an environment in which hundreds of those lakes now have strong fish populations—some carried on by natural reproduction for decades.
The lakes in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains historically didn’t contain fish, but stocking of trout that began in the early 1900s has created an environment in which hundreds of those lakes now have strong fish populations—some carried on by natural reproduction for decades.
This environment also has provided a laboratory for researchers to study the ecosystem changes in the once-fishless alpine lakes, to which anglers today make long hikes to pursue cutthroat trout and relatively rare golden trout.
Previous research found that the introduction of fish in the lakes of the Wind Rivers has driven a decrease in the size of zooplankton, the small aquatic organisms on which the trout feed. Now, University of Wyoming researchers have found that the fish themselves have adapted to their environment—“rapid evolution“ that sheds further light on the introduction of invasive species.
„These findings have important implications for understanding the capacity of even small founding populations to respond to novel ecological and evolutionary pressures in the face of rapid environmental changes,“ the UW researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Evolution.
