Department Aquatic Ecology

Amphipods are a highly diverse group of aquatic invertebrates with >10,000 described species globally. About 20% of these are freshwater species, with half of them found in the West Palaearctic. Amphipods inhabit almost all freshwater ecosystems, including lakes, rivers, streams, as well as cave and groundwater systems, and can be the dominant macroinvertebrates in these habitats. They exhibit essential roles in the functioning of aquatic ecosystems, contributing to leaf litter breakdown and serving as important prey for fish. Furthermore, they are commonly used as indicator taxa for biomonitoring and in ecotoxicological studies. Many amphipod communities are currently undergoing rapid changes due to various drivers of global change, and some amphipod species are among the most successful nonnative invasive invertebrates.
Despite their ecological and economic significance, the knowledge on amphipods in Switzerland was hitherto limited, and until now no checklist, distribution maps, or broadscale estimates on genetic, functional, and morphological diversity of all amphipod species in Switzerland existed. All hitherto available literature on the ecology, faunistics, and taxonomy of amphipods in Central Europe is either outdated by many decades (Chevreux & Fage, 1925; Schellenberg, 1942), does not cover all species (Ginet, 1995; Eggers & Martens, 2001, Piscart & Bollache, 2012), or is only targeting neighboring countries (Vornatscher, 1965; Karaman, 1993; Eggers & Martens, 2001; Piscart & Bollache, 2012, Zettler & Zettler, 2017). This lack of appropriate baseline information on the ecology, distribution and faunistics of amphipods in Switzerland is a serious limitation for fundamental ecological research, impedes appropriate conservation strategies, and limits the use and application of amphipods as indicator taxa.

Theory predicts that the distribution of genetic diversity in a landscape is strongly dependent on the connectivity of the metapopulation and the dispersal of individuals between patches. However, the influence of explicit spatial configurations such as dendritic landscapes on the genetic diversity of metapopulations is still understudied, and theoretical corroborations of empirical patterns are largely lacking. Here, we used microsatellite data and stochastic simulations of two metapopulations of freshwater amphipods in a 28,000 km² riverine network to study the influence of spatial connectivity and dispersal strategies on the spatial distribution of their genetic diversity. We found a significant imprint of the effects of riverine network connectivity on the local and global genetic diversity of both amphipod species. Data from 95 sites showed that allelic richness significantly increased towards more central nodes of the network. This was also seen for observed heterozygosity, yet not for expected heterozygosity. Genetic differentiation increased with instream distance. In simulation models, depending on the mutational model assumed, upstream movement probability and dispersal rate, respectively, emerged as key factors explaining the empirically observed distribution of local genetic diversity and genetic differentiation. Surprisingly, the role of site-specific carrying capacities, for example by assuming a direct dependency of population size on local river size, was less clear cut: while our best fitting model scenario included this feature, over all simulations, scaling of carrying capacities did not increase data-model fit. This highlights the importance of dispersal behaviour along spatial networks in shaping population genetic diversity.