Esocidae, Rafinesque, 1815

Esocidae View in CoL

The pike is a common species both in south-eastern and northern Norway. As a top predator it usually attracts attention, but still only 30 articles were found based on the standard search. If I included articles by Norwegian researchers working on pike in other countries the numbers would have been much higher (for example see Haugen et al. 2006, Carlson et al. 2007, Edeline et al. 2007, Haugen et al. 2007).

The ecology of the pike is well known (Skov and Nilsson 2018). In Norway, studies have to some degree focused on pike diet and thus its ecosystem effect as an apex predator (Vøllestad et al. 1986, Sandlund et al. 2016b). Some papers also investigate the ecological effects of various management actions, such as the effect of size-selective harvesting (Sharma and Borgstrøm 2008a). Such selective harvesting may also have unexpected effects on the accumulation of pollutants such as methyl-mercury (Sharma et al. 2008). As a top predator such pollutants may be up-concentrated in large and old individuals ( Frøslie et al. 1985, Sharma et al. 2009, Olk et al. 2016), potentially posing a risk to human health. In total, even if the number of published papers is relatively small, the level of ecological knowledge on the pike is in general good.

The pike has repeatedly been translocated outside of its native area, and is classified as a regionally non-native species with a potentially very strong ecological effect ( Table 1 View Table 1 ) (Byström et al. 2007, Hesthagen et al. 2015, Dunker et al. 2018, Jalbert et al. 2021, Perrin et al. 2021). Our knowledge about the ecological effects of new introductions seems adequate, but still some main understanding of their population dynamics is missing for Norwegian conditions. In particular, more knowledge about the effects of pike introduction into species poor and cold environments is needed. Clearly, also a better understanding of the invasion dynamics, such as dispersal dynamics and the drivers on long-distance translocations is needed.