PRIMARY RESEARCH PAPER Change in a lake benthic community over a century: evidence for alternative community states Alexander Y. Karatayev • Lyubov E. Burlakova • M. Jake Vander Zanden • Richard C. Lathrop • Dianna K. Padilla Received: 3 September 2011 / Revised: 20 June 2012 / Accepted: 23 June 2012 / Published online: 13 July 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract Aquatic communities are one of the most studied systems where alternative states or regime shifts have been detected. We used data spanning a century of time to test whether the zoobenthic community of Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, USA, was relatively stable through time, variable, or whether there was any evidence of alternative community states. We used multivariate statistical analyses to test for community structure similarity and whether detected differences corresponded to major changes in the local environment. Surprisingly, the benthic community in Lake Mendota was not statistically different from the mid 1960s to the present. Similarly, the benthic community was not significantly different from 1914 to the 1950s. However, between the 1950s and mid 1960s there was a dramatic change in the zoobenthic community, including the loss of key taxa and a decrease in the diversity of several major taxa. This dramatic change cannot be attributed to any single environmental factor, and is correlated with multiple factors acting simultaneously, including increased urban development, human population den- sity, intensive agriculture, and the introduction of a Handling editor: Sonja Stendera Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10750-012-1238-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. Y. Karatayev (&) Á L. E. Burlakova Great Lakes Center, Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222, USA e-mail: karataay@buffalostate.edu URL: http://www.buffalostate.edu/greatlakescenter/ x735.xml L. E. Burlakova The Research Foundation of The State University of New York, Buffalo State College, Office of Sponsored Programs, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Bishop Hall B17, Buffalo, NY 14222-1095, USA e-mail: burlakle@buffalostate.edu M. J. Vander Zanden Á R. C. Lathrop Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin— Madison, 680 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706, USA e-mail: mjvanderzand@wisc.edu R. C. Lathrop Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Madison, WI 53707, USA e-mail: rlathrop@wisc.edu D. K. Padilla Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5245, USA e-mail: padilla@life.bio.sunysb.edu 123 Hydrobiologia (2013) 700:287–300 DOI 10.1007/s10750-012-1238-2