Unsaturated fish assemblages in rivers of the North-Western France : potential consequences for species introductions

Introductions of freshwater fish into French rivers have been carried out with increasing frequency in the last decades. Thus, the potential impact of these introductions is of major concern for biologists and fishery managers. Knowledge of the degree of saturation of a community provides an important basis for understanding how the community reacts or will react to the introduction of new species. In this paper, we compare local and regional freshwater fish species richness in similar sizes tributaries and coastal rivers located in the same biogeographic region (North-Western France). We show 1) that species richness is greater for tributaries than for coastal rivers on both local (station) and regional (catchment) scales, and 2) that, whatever the rivers studied (tributaries or coastal rivers), there is a significant, positive linear relationship between local species richness and regional species richness. These findings suggest that local, and probably regional, freshwater fish communities in North-Western French rivers are unsaturated and thus, that major impacts on the community, such as short-term extinctions, are not to be expected. However, competition for food and space, predation, introduction of exotic parasites and diseases, could also affect some native species