Predation is one of the most important drivers of natural selection. In consequence a huge variety of anti-predator defenses have evolved in prey species. Under unpredictable and temporally variable predation pressure, the evolution of phenotypically plastic defensive traits is favored. These "inducible defenses", range from changes in behavior, life history, physiology to morphology and can be...

Consumers can have strong effects on the biotic and abiotic dynamics of spatially-structured ecosystems. In metacommunities, dispersing consumers can alter local assembly dynamics either directly through trophic interactions or indirectly by modifying local environmental conditions. In aquatic systems, very little is known about how key grazers, such as Daphnia, structure the microbial diversit...

To better understand the potential ecotoxicological impact of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and silver nanowires (AgNWs) released into freshwater environments, the toxicities of these nanomaterials were assessed and compared using Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) test guidelines, including a "Daphnia sp., acute immobilization test," "Fish, acute toxicity test," and "f...

Recent studies have demonstrated that Daphnia, a cladoceran (anomopod) zooplankton species with a high phosphorus content, can become P limited when fed algae deficient in phosphorus. Bosmina is another common anomopod zooplankter, but its body has a lower percentage of P than does that of Daphnia, and Bosmina might therefore be less susceptible to P mineral limitation. To test for this hypothe...

The species overlap between European and North American cladoceran faunas has been questioned from the very beginning of faunistic studies on Nearctic zooplankton and still remains unsettled. However, more recently, genetic techniques seem to overcome the limits of morphology as the basis for taxonomy. We analyzed 8–11 allozyme loci to assess the genetic differentiation between intercontinental...

Recent studies on the life histories of Daphnia hybrids and their parental species have revealed that hybrids can combine an intermediate size with a relatively high reproductive rate, which might explain their success in many European lakes. Based on this information, we formulated the temporal hybrid superiority hypothesis to explain the coexistence of parental species and their hybrids. Our ...