Environmental bottlenecks in life history stages determine the
population vulnerability of landlocked salmon
Abstract
The critical information for conserving endangered species is to
identify how different niche dimensions affect the bottlenecks in the
life history stages of populations. However, it is often difficult to
quantify how each niche dimension affects different life history stages
because environmental factors may affect each fitness component of
organisms to various degrees. Here, we applied the recently developed
hypervolume method that follows the idea of Hutchinson’s n-dimensional
hypervolume. We analyzed the niche space of different life history
stages of the endangered landlocked salmon Oncorhynchus masou
formosanus, the most southerly distributed of all salmonoids. We found
no direct effect of water pollution on adult population density but a
significant negative effect on their embryo hatching rate. Surprisingly,
the niche hypervolume analysis showed that the size of embryo niche
hypervolume was only 42% and 45.3% of the natural redd density or
adult population density, respectively. This result suggests that water
quality requirements during the embryonic stage are a key bottleneck in
the life history stages of O. m. formosanus. Our results suggest that
understanding the behavioral and physiological mechanisms that influence
crucial life history stages in the wild is critical to developing
effective conservation programs, and the niche hypervolume is a valuable
method to achieve this.