Anna Kuparinen

• PhD, Adjunct Professor
• Professor (Associate) at University of Jyväskylä

Fishing‐induced evolution can impact fish trait distributions, with previous studies highlighting declines in size and age at maturation. However, the effects on fish growth remain less understood, and different fishing methods may exert distinct selection pressures on populations. This study explores the impact of gillnetting on pikeperch (Sander...

Differential equation models are powerful tools for predicting biological systems, capable of projecting far into the future and incorporating data recorded at arbitrary times. However, estimating these models' parameters from observations can be challenging because numerical methods are often required to approximate their solution. An example of s...

Animals with different life‐history types vary in their stress‐coping styles, which can affect their fitness and survival in changing environments. We studied how chronic exposure to manganese sulfate (MnSO4), a common aquatic pollutant, affects life‐history traits, physiology, and behavior of zebrafish (Danio rerio) with two life‐history types: fa...

Animals with different life- history types vary in their stress-coping styles, which can affect their fitness and survival in changing environments. We studied how chronic exposure to manganese sulfate (MnSO4), a common aquatic pollutant, affects life- history traits, physiology, and behavior of zebrafish (Danio rerio) with two life- history types:...

Key life‐history data, such as growth and age, are necessary to effectively manage and conserve threatened freshwater mussel species. Traditionally growth and age studies require large yet destructive sample sizes covering all age classes. Such methods pose a risk to populations of conservation concern, and therefore, alternative methods that need...

Ecological stability is a fundamental aspect of food web dynamics. In this study, we explore the factors influencing stability in complex ecological networks, characterizing it through biomass oscillations and species persistence. Using an Extended Niche model, we generate diverse food web structures and investigate the effects of intraspecific con...

Fish communities face changes in environmental conditions and fishing that affects the abundances and structures of the populations. Before 1960s there were abundant stocks of both pikeperch (Stizostedion lucioperca) and whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) in Lake Oulujärvi, but in 1960s-1970s the stock of pikeperch declined to very low levels while wh...

Fishing-induced evolution (FIE) threatens the ecology, resilience, and economic value of fish populations. Traits under selection, and mechanisms of selection, can be influenced by abiotic and biotic perturbations, yet this has been overlooked. Here, we present the fishery selection continuum, where selection ranges from rigid fisheries selection t...

Ecological stability is a fundamental aspect of food web dynamics. In this study, we explore the factors influencing stability in complex ecological networks, characterizing it through biomass oscillations and species persistence. Using an Extended Niche model, we generate diverse food web structures and investigate the effects of intraspecific con...

Foraging is a behavioural process and, therefore, individual behaviour and diet are theorized to covary. However, few comparisons of individual behaviour type and diet exist in the wild. We tested whether behaviour type and diet covary in a protected population of Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua. Working in a no‐take marine reserve, we could collect dat...

Marine populations often show considerable variation in their productivity, including regime shifts. Of special interest are prolonged shifts to low recruitment and low abundance which occur in many fish populations despite reductions in fishing pressure. One of the possible causes for the lack of recovery has been suggested to be the Allee effect...

Invasive species constitute a threat not only to native populations but also to the structure and functioning of entire food webs. Despite being considered as a global problem, only a small number of studies have quantitatively predicted the food web-level consequences of invasions. Here, we use an allometric trophic network model parameterized usi...

Current ecological research and ecosystem management call for improved understanding of the abiotic drivers of community dynamics, including temperature effects on species interactions and biomass accumulation. Allometric trophic network (ATN) models, which simulate material (carbon) transfer in trophic networks from producers to consumers based on...

Harvesting has been implicated in destabilizing the abundances of exploited populations. Because selective harvesting often targets large individuals, some studies have proposed that exploited populations often experience demographic shifts toward younger, smaller individuals and become more sensitive to environmental fluctuations. The theory of co...

Current ecological research and ecosystem management call for improved understanding of the abiotic drivers of community dynamics, including temperature effects on species interactions and biomass accumulation. Allometric trophic network (ATN) models provide an attractive framework to study consumer-resource interactions from organisms to ecosystem...

The main objective of the workshop was to review the recommendations of WKREF1 and consider how these might feed into a new reference points framework and guidelines for ICES. There were a number of presentations on the wider issues of best practice for reference points, the Allee effect, density dependence and the WKIRISH approach. The starting po...

Can the advantage of risk-managing life-history strategies become a disadvantage under human-induced evolution? Organisms have adapted to the variability and uncertainty of environmental conditions with a vast diversity of life-history strategies. One such evolved strategy is multiple-batch spawning, a spawning strategy common to long-lived fishes...

Understanding fish population oscillations is important for both fundamental population biology and for fisheries science. Much research has focused on the causes of population oscillations, but the eco-evolutionary consequences of population oscillations are unclear. Here, we used an empirically parametrised individual-based simulation model to ex...

Whether gill area constrains fish metabolism through oxygen limitation is a debated topic. Here, the authors provide insights into this question by analysing mass‐specific metabolic rates across 44 teleost fishes extracted from FishBase. They explore whether species deviations from metabolic rates predicted by body mass can be explained by species...

Spatial and temporal synchrony in abundance or survival trends can be indicative of whether populations are affected by common environmental drivers. In Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), return rates to natal rivers have generally been assumed to be affected primarily by shared oceanic conditions, leading to spatially synchronous trends in mortality....

Parasitic salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) threaten the economic and ecological sustainability of salmon farming, and their evolved resistance to treatment with emamectin benzoate (EMB) has been a major problem for salmon farming in the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast, the Pacific Ocean, where wild salmon are far more abundant, has not seen widesp...

According to the theory of compensatory dynamics, depleted populations should recover when the threat responsible for their decline is removed because per capita population growth is assumed to be highest when populations are at their smallest viable sizes. Yet, many seriously depleted fish populations have failed to recover despite threat mitigati...

Trophic cascade studies often rely on linear food chains instead of complex food webs and are typically measured as biomass averages, not as biomass variation. We study trophic cascades propagating across a complex food web including a measure of biomass variation in addition to biomass average. We examined whether different fishing strategies indu...

Trophic cascade studies often rely on linear food chains instead of complex food webs and are typically measured as biomass averages, not as biomass variation. We study trophic cascades propagating across a complex food web including a measure of biomass variation in addition to biomass average. We examined whether different fishing strategies indu...

Competition for shared resources is commonly assumed to restrict population‐level niche width of coexisting species. However, the identity and abundance of coexisting species, the prevailing environmental conditions, and the individual body size may shape the effects of interspecific interactions on species’ niche width. Here we study the effects o...

Many considerably declined fish populations have not fully recovered despite reductions in fishing pressure. One of the possible causes of impaired recovery is the (demographic) Allee effect. To investigate whether low‐abundance recruitment dynamics can switch between compensation and depensation, the latter implying the presence of the Allee effec...

Biological organisms can vastly change their ecological functionality due to changes in body size and diet across their life. Consequently, it has been increasingly recognized that to attain sufficient biological realism, food webs may need to include life-history structures. The objective of the work is to study theoretically whether and how the i...

Senescence is often described as an age‐dependent increase in natural mortality (known as actuarial senescence) and an age‐dependent decrease in fecundity (known as reproductive senescence), and its role in nature is still poorly understood. Based on empirical estimates of reproductive and actuarial senescence, we used mathematical simulations to e...

Fisheries exploitation can cause genetic changes in heritable traits of targeted stocks. The direction of selective pressure forced by harvest acts typically in reverse to natural selection and selects for explicit life‐histories, usually for younger and smaller spawners with deprived spawning potential. While the consequences that such selection m...

Stochastic environments shape life‐history traits and can promote selection for risk‐spreading strategies, such as bet‐hedging. Although the strategy has often been hypothesised to exist for various species, empirical tests providing firm evidence have been rare, mainly due to the challenge in tracking fitness across generations. Here, we take a ‘p...

As a consequence of climate change and open net-pen salmon farming, wild Atlantic salmon Salmo salar are increasingly likely to encounter elevated temperatures and parasite abundances during their early marine migration. Such stressors can compromise fitness by diminishing liver energy stores and impairing cardiac muscle. To assess whether temperat...

The presence of senescence in natural populations remains an unsolved problem in biology. Described as an age-dependent increase in natural mortality (known as actuarial senescence) and an age-dependent decrease in fecundity (known as reproductive senescence), the role of senescence in nature is still poorly understood. Based on empirical estimates...

Infectious diseases are key drivers of wildlife populations and agriculture production, but whether and how climate change will influence disease impacts remains controversial. One of the critical knowledge gaps that prevents resolution of this controversy is a lack of high-quality experimental data, especially in marine systems of significant ecol...

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...

The ocean is a lifeline for human existence, but current practices risk severely undermining ocean sustainability. Present and future social−ecological challenges necessitate the maintenance and development of knowledge and action by stimulating collaboration among scientists and between science, policy, and practice. Here we explore not only how s...

Genetic and genomic architectures of traits under selection are key factors influencing evolutionary responses. Yet, knowledge of their impacts has been limited by a widespread assumption that most traits are controlled by unlinked polygenic architectures. Recent advances in genome sequencing and eco-evolutionary modelling are unlocking the potenti...

The ability of a population to recover from disturbances is fundamental for its persistence. Impaired population recovery might be associated with a demographic Allee effect. Immigration from adjacent populations could accelerate the recovery not only by promoting population growth beyond the Allee effect threshold but also by bringing in advantage...

Body size acts as a proxy for many fitness-related traits. Body size is also subject to directional selection from various anthropogenic stressors such as increasing water temperature, decreasing dissolved oxygen, fisheries, as well as natural predators. Changes in individual body size correlate with changes in fecundity, behaviour, and survival an...

Genetic and genomic architectures of traits under selection are key factors influencing evolutionary responses. Yet, knowledge of their impacts has been limited by a widespread assumption that most traits are controlled by unlinked polygenic architectures. Recent advances in genome sequencing and eco-evolutionary modelling are unlocking the potenti...

The argument that sufficiently high fishing mortality (selective or not) can effect genetic change in fished populations has gained considerable traction since the late 1970s. The intervening decades have provided compelling experimental and model‐based evidence that fisheries‐induced evolution (FIE) can cause genetic changes in life history, behav...

Advances in genetic and genomic technologies have become widely available and have potential to provide novel insights into fish biology and fisheries science. In the present overview, we explore cases for which genomic analyses have proven instrumental in the rejection of hypotheses that have been well-motivated based on phenotypic and ecological...

• Body size determines key ecological and evolutionary processes of organisms. Therefore, organisms undergo extensive shifts in resources, competitors, and predators as they grow in body size. While empirical and theoretical evidence show that these size‐dependent ontogenetic shifts vastly influence the structure and dynamics of populations, theory...

Small-bodied wrasse species are important for structuring coastal marine ecosystems but are also increasingly harvested as parasite cleaners on farmed salmon. Identifying management regulations that will support long-term sustainability of wrasse fisheries is challenging, because there is still limited knowledge about the impacts of fisheries on th...

Stochastic variability of key abiotic factors including temperature, precipitation and the availability of light and nutrients greatly influences species’ ecological function and evolutionary fate. Despite such influence, ecologists have typically ignored the effect of abiotic stochasticity on the structure and dynamics of ecological networks. Here...

Fish stocking is used worldwide in conservation and management, but its effects on food-web dynamics and ecosystem stability are poorly known. To better understand these effects and predict the outcomes of stocking, we used an empirically validated network model of a well-studied lake ecosystem. We simulate two stocking scenarios with two native fi...

Recreational fishers preferentially target top predators (Donaldson et al. 2011). In this context, northern pike (Esox lucius Linnaeus, 1758, hereafter pike for simplicity) constitutes a preferred target species of many freshwater and coastal recreational fishers across much of its natural circumpolar distribution in the northern hemisphere (e.g. P...

In Focus: Berec , L. , Kremer , A.M. , Bernhauverova , V. , & Drake , J.M. ( 2017 ). . Journal of Animal Ecology , 87 , 24 – 35 . https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12662 In Focus: Shaw , A.K. , Kokko , H. , & Neubert , M.G. ( 2017 ). . Journal of Animal Ecology , 87 , 36 – 46 . https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12658 Lowered population growth abili...

Data-limited fisheries are a major challenge for stock assessment analysts, as many traditional data-rich models cannot be implemented. Approaches based on stock reduction analysis offer simple ways to handle low data availability, but are particularly sensitive to assumptions on relative stock status (i.e., current biomass compared to unperturbed...

The demographic Allee effect, or depensation, implies positive association between per capita population growth rate and population size at low abundances, thereby lowering growth ability of sparse populations. This can have far-reaching consequences on population recovery ability and colonization success. In the context of marine fishes, there is...

Probability of species recovery is thought to be correlated with specific aspects of organismal life history, such as age at maturity and longevity, and how these affect rates of natural mortality (M) and maximum per capita population growth (rmax). Despite strong theoretical underpinnings, these correlates have been based on predicted rather than...

In passively operated fishing gear, boldness-related behaviors should fundamentally affect the vulnerability of individual fish and thus be under fisheries selection. To test this hypothesis, we used juvenile common-garden reared carp (Cyprinus carpio) within a narrow size-range to investigate the mechanistic basis of behavioral selection caused by...

Already by the early dawn of evolutionary biology, it was appreciated that ecological differences among species’ habitats, resources, and environments were key drivers of evolution and speciation. Thus, research on interactions between ecology and evolution is not a novel endeavor. It has, however, become increasingly popular to provide these inter...

Scientific Reports 6 : Article number: 22245 10.1038/srep22245 ; published online: 26 February 2016 ; updated: 06 February 2017 In the ‘Fish life-histories and population dynamics’ section of this Article the authors erroneously cited a personal communication with R. Eckmann.

Commercial and recreational harvests create selection pressures for fitness-related phenotypic traits that are partly under genetic control. Consequently, harvesting can drive evolution in targeted traits. However, the quantification of harvest-induced evolutionary life history and phenotypic changes is challenging, because both density-dependent f...

Life-history traits are generally assumed to be inherited quantitatively. Fishing that targets large, old individuals is expected to decrease age at maturity. In Atlantic salmon ( Salmo salar ), it has recently been discovered that sea age at maturity is under strong control by a single locus with sexually dimorphic expression of heterozygotes, whi...

The REVEALS model is applied in quantitative vegetation reconstruction to translate pollen percentage data from large lakes and peatlands into regional vegetation composition. The model was first presented in 2007 and has gained increasing attention. It is a core element of the Landcover 6k initiative within the PAGES project. The REVEALS model has...

Research Cite this article: Uusi-Heikkilä S, Lindström K, Parre N, Arlinghaus R, Alós J, Kuparinen A. 2016 Altered trait variability in response to size-selective mortality. Biol. Lett. 12: 20160584. http://dx. Changes in trait variability owing to size-selective harvesting have received little attention in comparison with changes in mean trait val...

Marine ecosystems can undergo regime shifts, which result in nonstationarity in the dynamics of the fish populations inhabiting them. The assumption of time-invariant parameters in stock–recruitment models can lead to severe errors when forecasting renewal ability of stocks that experience shifts in their recruitment dynamics. We present a novel me...

Table S1. Age‐specific vital rates for simulated cod populations at representative time periods. Table S2. Age‐specific vital rates for cod life table #2 under different assumptions about adult survival.

Data S1. Age‐specific variance in reproductive success. Figure S1. Patterns of adult survival (individuals age 3+) as a function of age in simulated cod populations. Figure S2. Effects of varying levels of fishing intensity for simulated cod populations. Results are for selective fishing without evolution (i.e., as in Fig. 5, main text, but witho...

Fishing is widely known to magnify fluctuations in targeted populations. These fluctuations are correlated with population shifts towards young, small, and more quickly maturing individuals. However, the existence and nature of the mechanistic basis for these correlations and their potential ecosystem impacts remain highly uncertain. Here, we eluci...

Barriers to migration can negatively affect population persistence. To explore how dams can influence the viability of a diadromous fish, we developed an empirically based stochastic model to estimate per-capita population growth rate (r) and probability of population decline (Pr(r < 0)). Our simulations incorporated life-history parameters common...

Much has been written about fishery-induced evolution (FIE) in exploited species, but relatively little attention has been paid to the consequences for one of the most important parameters in evolutionary biology—effective population size (Ne). We use a combination of simulations of Atlantic cod populations experiencing harvest, artificial manipula...

Evidence is accumulating that many marine ectotherms are undergoing rapid changes in their life-history characteristics. These changes have been variously attributed to fisheries-induced evolution, inhibited adult growth rate due to oxygen limitation at higher temperatures, and plastic responses to density dependence or changes in ocean productivit...

Background: A highly mobile marine fish, Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), inhabits southern Norwegian coastal habitats that offer limited potential for individual dispersal and migration. Questions: Do coastal populations of cod differ in life history? If so, is the variability spatially persistent and does it vary with time? What factors are responsib...

Changes in trait variability owing to size-selective harvesting have received little attention in comparison with changes in mean trait values, perhaps because of the expectation that phenotypic variability should generally be eroded by directional selection typical for fishing and hunting. We show, however, that directional selection, in particula...

Changes in trait variability owing to size-selective harvesting have received little attention in comparison with changes in mean trait values, perhaps because of the expectation that phenotypic variability should generally be eroded by directional selection typical for fishing and hunting. We show, however, that directional selection, in particula...

Changes in trait variability owing to size-selective harvesting have received little attention in comparison with changes in mean trait values, perhaps because of the expectation that phenotypic variability should generally be eroded by directional selection typical for fishing and hunting. We show, however, that directional selection, in particula...

Long distance gene flow and adaptation of forest trees to rapid climate change

Factors affecting population recovery from depletion are at the focus of wildlife management. Particularly, it has been debated how life-history characteristics might affect population recovery ability and productivity. Many exploited fish stocks have shown temporal changes towards earlier maturation and reduced adult body size, potentially owing t...

A basic challenge to successful management and conflict resolution is to correctly identify the spatial scale at which strategies for harvesting are developed. For commercially exploited marine fish, distributional boundaries of many stocks are based on the premise that productivity is similar at spatial scales that represent a small fraction of an...

Estimation of population abundances in the absence of good observational data are notoriously difficult, yet urgently needed for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. In the field of fisheries research, management regulations have long demanded population abundance estimates even if data available are sparse, leading t...

This study presents a state-space modelling framework for the purposes of stock assessment. The stochastic population dynamics build on the notion of correlated survival and capture events among individuals. The correlation is thought to arise as a combination of schooling behaviour, a spatially patchy environment, and common but unobserved environ...