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Is Dikerogammarus villosus (Crustacea, Gammaridae) a ‘killer shrimp’ in the River Rhine system?

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Abstract

Communities and food web structures of aquatic ecosystems can be strongly affected by the establishment of alien macroinvertebrate species. In many European waters, the invasion of the Ponto-Caspian amphipod Dikerogammarus villosus has led to displacement of other macroinvertebrates. Predation by D. villosus is often assumed to be the key driver of the displacement based on results of laboratory studies, but this has not been verified in the field. Here, we report our investigation of the relevance of D. villosus predation in the River Rhine system using both stable isotope analyses of δ13C and δ15N, and molecular analyses of D. villosus gut contents with group-specific primers aiming at macroinvertebrate prey taxa. Stable isotope analyses of D. villosus from ten sites showed mean δ15N values comparable to those of primary consumers. Overall, only approximately 1% of all tested primer/gut content combinations revealed DNA of the respective taxa. Both indicate minor importance of predation by D. villosus as a driver of the observed macroinvertebrate displacement. Conceivably, competitive strength due to opportunistic feeding, indicated by different niche widths between and a strong intraspecific variation of δ13C values of D. villosus within sites of our study, is much more important for its invasion success.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Franz Schöll from the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) for the opportunity to sample the main stretch of the Rhine from a dredger and Karl-Otto Rothhaupt for use of the facilities of the Limnological Institute of the University of Konstanz. We thank Claudia Grimm, Iris Tuchscherer and Maximilian Schneider for their help during field sampling and sample processing, Martin Alt for graphical support and Karen A. Brune for linguistic revision of the manuscript. This study was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG; project GE 2219/3-1) and the University of Koblenz-Landau.

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  1. Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Koblenz-Landau, Fortstr. 7, Landau, 76829, Germany

    Meike Koester, Bastian Bayer & René Gergs

  2. Federal Environment Agency, Schichauweg 58, Berlin, 12307, Germany

    René Gergs

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  1. Meike Koester
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Correspondence to Meike Koester.

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Koester, M., Bayer, B. & Gergs, R. Is Dikerogammarus villosus (Crustacea, Gammaridae) a ‘killer shrimp’ in the River Rhine system?. Hydrobiologia 768, 299–313 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-015-2558-9

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