Dietary Variation in a Freshwater Fish Species: Relative Contributions of Biotic Interactions, Abiotic Factors, and Spatial Structure

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Abstract
We used multivariate analyses to examine which variables among the environmental and spatial components can best account for dietary variation in a freshwater fish, brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis. The diet composition of brook trout was quantified in 37 lakes of the Laurentian Shield, Québec, Canada. Among the 25 measured environmental variables, fish species composition, sampling date, macrophyte abundance, and trout body length were the best predictors of diet composition. The total variation in diet composition was partitioned into four components: pure environmental 21.6%, pure spatial 23.2%, shared 19.9%, and unexplained 35.3%. A significant spatial trend in diet composition existed even after accounting for the main effects measured by the environmental variables. The two sets of spatial variables, when combined with the environmental descriptors, extracted different components of the dietary variation. The study allowed us to (1) highlight the role of spatial structure in diet variation of brook trout, (2) determine the relative contribution of both environmental and spatial components, and (3) generate testable hypotheses concerning mechanisms underlying the observed structure. Dependent variables other than diet composition, such as the density of different species at different sampling sites, can be used within the same statistical framework in studies of community ecology.