Environmental disturbance alters the ecological impact of an invading shrimp

1. Alien species are altering ecosystems around the globe. To predict and manage their impacts, the underlying mechanisms need to be understood. This is challenging in ecosystems undergoing multiple disturbances as unexpected interactions can alter the impact of individual disturbances. Such interactions are likely to be common in disturbed ecosystems, but have so far received little attention.
2. We investigated whether interactions between an invading shrimp Palaemon elegans and another human-induced disturbance, the population growth of a native mesopredator, the threespine stickleback, influences a third human-induced disturbance, the increase in biomass of filamentous algae. Increases in both the native mesopredator population and algal biomass have been promoted by eutrophication and a trophic cascade triggered by declining predatory fish stocks.
3. We used mesocosm and field enclosure experiments, combined with analyses of long-term trends in the abundance of the invader and th...