Eco‐evolutionary dynamics driven by fishing: from single species models to dynamic evolution within complex food webs

Evidence of contemporary evolution across ecological time scales
stimulated research on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of natural
populations. Aquatic systems provide a good setting to study
eco-evolutionary dynamics owing to a wealth of long-term monitoring data
and the detected trends in fish life-history traits across intensively
harvested marine and freshwater systems. In the present study, we focus on
modelling approaches to simulate eco-evolutionary dynamics of fishes and
their ecosystems. Firstly, we review the development of modelling from
single-species to multispecies approaches. Secondly, we advance the
current state-of-the-art methodology by implementing evolution of
life-history traits of a top predator into the context of complex food web
dynamics as described by the allometric trophic network (ATN) framework.
The functioning of our newly developed eco-evolutionary ATNE framework is
illustrated using a well-studied lake food web. Our simulations show how
both natural selection arising from feeding interactions and
size-selective fishing cause evolutionary changes in the top predator and
how those feed back to its prey species and further cascade down to lower
trophic levels. Finally, we discuss future directions, particularly the
need to integrate genomic discoveries into eco-evolutionary projections.