For Dr. Marie Gutgesell, her fascination with aquatic life began when she was a child, peering into tidal pools and marveling at the tiny world beneath the surface of the water. That tiny world stayed with her, as her early curiosity turned into an undergraduate thesis with Dr. Kevin McCann, looking more deeply at the intricate connections within aquatic ecosystems. Days spent catching fish, searching for aquatic insects and piecing together food web puzzles cemented Gutgesell’s desire to explore how human activities, especially food production, reshape these delicate systems.
Gutgesell went on to lead a global synthesis project in collaboration with international scientists as a postdoctoral researcher in McCann’s lab, contributing to research funded by Food from Thought. Their findings revealed a troubling pattern: the push for more food production has simplified complex ecosystems, both on land and in water. In short, intensified food production practices reduced biodiversity and increased ecosystem instability.
“On land, diverse habitats have given way to monocultures” says Gutgesell “and in aquatic systems, fishing practices and habitat destruction have eroded the foundation of food webs, favoring smaller, faster-growing species.”
These trends were powerfully visible in Gutgesell’s fieldwork focused on streams within the Lake Erie watershed. Sampling over 20 sites along a gradient of agricultural impact, her team measured everything from fish diets and insect communities to streamside vegetation. The results were clear, in highly impacted streams fish relied less on typical food resources like fallen leaves and more on algae and aquatic insects, effectively “rewiring” food webs.
Why should we worry about a rewired food web? A rewired food web can lead to large downstream impacts, including the disappearance or overgrowth of some species and imbalanced resources for other living creatures within the ecosystem. In other words, a potentially different looking habitat that fewer species can live in.
However, Gutgesell’s team also found that intensified farms who incorporated preserved streamside vegetation buffers maintained more balanced resource use, suggesting that simple land management practices, like maintaining these riparian buffers, could help preserve the ecosystem function and thus protect food web resilience.
Beyond academic publications, Gutgesell has shared her findings directly with farmers and landowners, offering site-specific reports and fostering conversations about biodiversity. She recalls one landowner who asked for advice on creating alternative habitats for birds and bats affected by a building project. This connection was a moment that underscored the value of connecting science with community stewardship.
Her vision for the future is one where food systems and ecosystems thrive together. “We need to produce food, and we need to find approaches that are mutually beneficial for food systems and ecosystems”, says Gutgesell. By incorporating habitat diversity and ecological principles into agricultural landscapes, Gutgesell believes we can build food systems that are not only productive but also resilient to future challenges.
Learn more about research on healthy aquatic ecosystems through the work of Dr. Kevin McCann and his team.
