Changing food webs of Indian aquatic ecosystems under the threats of invasive species: An overview

Abstract

Biological invasions are a worldwide threat to the aquatic systems and have the potential to homogenize entire foodwebs and shift species abundance distributions to more skewed ones. Invasion impacts include effects on the foodweb structure and ecosystem functioning leading to a loss in native fish biodiversity and commercially important fisheries in many open water systems. The impacts of invasives are generally devastating as they spread in the foodweb with each species potentially interacting with multiple species. The foodweb modeling studies conducted in different inland aquatic ecosystems show that not all exotics cause a detrimental effect on the resilience of an ecosystem. Information on the foodweb structure and ecosystem properties is a prerequisite for formulating management protocols for conserving biodiversity, enhancement programmes and sustaining fisheries. The present paper reviews the impacts of invasive fishes in Indian aquatic ecosystems in the context of a changing foodweb scenario due to exotic fish species invasions. The information generated here could be applied for future research on similar ecosystems for deducing management actions.