Life history responses to changes in food quality within Daphnia populations
Jana Isanta Navarro, doctoral researcher in the team of Dominik Martin-Creuzburg, is invited to talk about her research at the University of Potsdam on Monday, 13th January 2020.
The inability of Daphnia to discriminate between food particles makes them particularly vulnerable to nutritionally-poor food. Like all other arthropods, Daphnia are incapable to synthesize sterols and long-chain PUFA de novo. Eutrophication of lake ecosystems often leads to a high accumulation of cyanobacteria biomass. As cyanobacteria lack essential lipids, their proliferation in eutrophic lakes presenst a severe challenge for zooplankton. Jana is going to talk about how these changes in food quality, that can be associated with changes in lake trophic state, impact important behaviour- and survial- strategies of the keystone herbivore Daphnia and that these changes can lead to micro-evolutionary processes within Daphnia populations.