Subsidy Accessibility Drives Asymmetric Food Web Responses

Abstract Global change is fundamentally altering flows of natural and anthropogenic subsidies across space and time. After a pointed call for research on subsidies in the 1990s, an industry of empirical work has documented the ubiquitous role subsidies play in ecosystem structure, stability and function. Here, we argue that physical constraints (e.g., water temperature) and species traits can govern a species’ accessibility to resource subsidies, and that these physical constraints have been largely overlooked in the subsidy literature. We examined the input of a high quality, point-source anthropogenic subsidy into a recipient freshwater lake food web (i.e., released net-pen aquaculture feed in Parry Sound, Lake Huron), to demonstrate the importance of subsidy accessibility in governing recipient whole food web responses. By using a combined bio-tracer approach, we detect a gradient in accessibility of the anthropogenic subsidy within the surrounding food web driven by the thermal tolerances of three constituent species. This thermally-driven accessibility gradient drives asymmetrical changes in food web structure, effectively rewiring the recipient lake food web and altering patterns in secondary production with yet unknown stability consequences. Since aquaculture is predicted to increase significantly in coming decades to support growing human populations, and global change is altering temperature regimes, then this form of food web alteration may be expected to occur frequently. We argue that subsidy accessibility is a key characteristic of recipient food web interactions that must be considered when trying to understand the impacts of subsidies on ecosystem stability and function under continued global change.