Coregonus albula (Linnaeus, 1758)

Vendace Coregonus albula (Linnaeus, 1758) View in CoL

Vendace was investigated in a total of 49 papers over the 40-year time period investigate. On average a little over one paper has been published per year, and there was no temporal trend in the publication rate (slope estimate 0.02 ± 0.02 year-1). The vendace has a limited distribution in Norway, with its main distribution along the border to Sweden in the south-eastern part of the country. Previous stocking efforts have, however, also led to the species being distributed outside its natural distribution area (Sandlund et al. 2013b).

The introduction of the vendace to the Pasvik river system in North-Norway has raised particular interest ( Amundsen et al. 1999). The focus has been on how the introduction of this efficient zooplankton predator has led to changes in the ecosystem, and in particular how it has impacted the dynamics of the polymorphic whitefish ( Bøhn and Amundsen 2001, Bøhn et al. 2008). Almost half of the publications on vendace were on various topics related to the invasion into the Pasvik system. All of these papers are from the 1990s onwards. This means that almost all articles on the vendace during the last 20 years are from the Pasvik system, and mainly focussing on the ecosystem effects of the invasion of vendace into this river system. Based on these observations the vendace is classified as a regionally invasive species with low risk ( Artsdatabanken 2018).

Clearly, a lot has been learnt on the trophic ecology of the vendace, and how this species interacts with different parts of the food web in arctic systems. But the strong geographic bias also indicates that little effort has been invested into understanding the ecological function of vendace in more southern and biologically complex systems. Even in the lake Mjøsa, where there earlier was a famous fishery for vendace (or lågåsild as it is locally known) (Huitfeldt-Kaas 1917, Aass 1972), very little recent work has been published (Naesje et al. 1986, Naesje et al. 1991, Gregersen et al. 2011). This is unfortunate, as this and other comparable lakes have experienced large environmental changes during the last decades (Moe et al. 2022).