Human society is dependent on healthy aquatic ecosystems for our basic needs and well-being. Therefore, knowledge about how organisms respond and interact with their environments is pivotal. The Baltic Sea is highly affected by human activity and future populations living in its catchment area will have to respond to multiple set of changing abiotic and biotic predictors.

The first two papers of this thesis focus on local adaptation, adaptive capacity, and the response to changing temperature, salinity, and food conditions of different Eurytemora affinis populations, a ubiquitous zooplankton species in the Baltic Sea. Development time of zooplankton is an important trait and relates to how fast a population can increase in number. Common garden experiments showed that E. affinis populations from warmer southern areas had shorter development time from nauplii to adult at high temperature compared to populations from colder areas, which indicates an adaptation to temperature. The adaptation was explained by a correlation in development time between higher temperatures, 17 and 22.5 °C, while development between a colder temperature, 12 °C, and the two higher temperatures was uncorrelated. This implies that adaption to short development time at high temperature is unlikely for populations originating from cold temperatures. Hence, global warming will be disadvantageous for northern, compared to southern populations. However, development time is heritable and may change under selection, and may improve the competitive advantage of northern populations. The population with the shortest development time had comparably lower survival at high temperature and low food quality. This represents a cost of fast development, and emphasizes the importance of including multiple stressors when investigating potential effects of climate change.

E. affinis inhabits a broad range of habitats from an epi-benthic life in freshwater lakes and river mouths, to pelagic life in estuaries. Paper III aims to link the morphology of different populations to habitat and resource utilization. Results showed that the individuals of a pelagic population were smaller in size and more slender, compared to a littoral population of larger and more fecund individuals. In experimentally constructed benthic and pelagic algae communities, the littoral population produced less offspring than the pelagic population when filamentous benthic diatoms were included. This suggests that filaments disturb their feeding and that littoral populations of E. affinis stay epi-benthic. As pelagic fish typically select larger prey, living close to the bottom probably allows the littoral population to grow larger than the pelagic. These results link morphology to habitat specialization, and show contrasting ecological effects of two E. affinis populations.

Paper IV focuses on the recreational angler’s potential role as a citizen scientist. The pike Esox lucius has a stabilizing role in ecosystems as a top consumer and is highly valued by recreational anglers in European lakes and estuaries. Results showed that recreational angling could be used to estimate population size and connectivity of E. lucius in spatial capture-recapture models. The only prerequisite is that anglers practice catch and release, retain spatial data, and take photos of their caught fish. These results show that data from recreational angling can be of potential use for fisheries managers and researchers.