Recent studies have also shown the reciprocal, that the phenotypic variation that emerges on contemporary timescales can have strong effects on ecological processes 1, 7, 8, 9, 10. It is now well recognized that ecological factors, including human mediated environmental change, can cause rapid evolution, including diversification within species 4, 5, 6. Understanding the ecological implications of contemporary evolution is one of the critical challenges for biologists in the twenty-first century 1, 2, 3. Understanding how strong interactions propagate through food webs to influence diversification across multiple trophic levels is critical to understand eco-evolutionary interactions in complex natural ecosystems. The landlocking of alewife by human dam construction has repeatedly created a stable open water prey resource, novel to coastal lakes, that has promoted the parallel emergence of a habitat polymorphism in chain pickerel. Here we show that life history diversification in a keystone prey species, the alewife ( Alosa pseudoharengus), propagates up through the food web to promote phenotypic diversification in its native top predator, the chain pickerel ( Esox niger), on contemporary timescales. However, similar bottom-up eco-evolutionary effects are poorly described. Effects of intraspecific variation in keystone species have been shown to propagate down through the food web by altering the adaptive landscape for other species and creating a cascade of ecological and evolutionary change. Intraspecific phenotypic variation can strongly impact community and ecosystem dynamics.
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