Conservation of endangered galaxiid fishes in the Falkland Islands requires urgent action on invasive brown trout

Non-native salmonids are protected in the Southern hemisphere where they sustain aquaculture and valuable sport fisheries, but also impact on native galaxiid fishes, which poses a conservation conundrum. Legal protection and human-assisted secondary releases may have helped salmonids to spread, but this has seldom been tested. We reconstructed the introduction of brown trout ( Salmo trutta ) to the Falkland Islands using historical records and modelled its dispersal. Our results indicate that establishment success was ∼88%, and that dispersal was facilitated by proximity to introduction sites and density of stream-road crossings, suggesting it was human assisted. Brown trout has already invaded 54% of Falkland rivers, which are 2.9-4.5 times less likely to contain native galaxiids than uninvaded streams. Without strong containment we predict brown trout will invade nearly all suitable freshwater habitats in the Falklands within the next ∼70 years, which might put native freshwater fishes at a high risk of extinction.