Trophically transmitted parasites often manipulate the behaviour of their intermediate host, which is assumed to increase the vulnerability to predation by the final host (for a review, see Moore 2002). However, the adaptive value of behavioural changes associated with infections is difficult to demonstrate. Increased predation by the final host is the main criterion supporting adaptive manipul...

Biomass of the crustacean Artemia sp. has multiple uses. The biochemical composition and biomass production of Artemia grown from cysts produced by a native population from Real de Salinas were evaluated under laboratory conditions. Nauplii (instar I) were stocked at density of 10 nauplii/ml in 1.5 l tanks, fed with rice bran from day 2 to day 6, and with the microalgae Tetraselmis suecica from...

Filter-feeding organisms are often keystone species with a major influence on the dynamics of aquatic ecosystems. Studies of filtering rates in such taxa are therefore vital in order to understand ecosystem functioning and the impact of natural and anthropogenic stressors such as parasites, climate warming and invasive species. Brine shrimps Artemia spp. are the dominant grazers in hypersaline ...

The brine shrimp Artemia has three extracellular hemoglobins (Hbs) that are developmentally expressed and exhibit distinct oxygen-binding characteristics (Heip, Moens, and Kondo 1978; Heip et al. 1978 ). These Hbs are composed of two polymers, each of which comprises nine covalently linked globin domains. Although the cDNA sequences of two nine-domain globins from Artemia have been published, t...

The Hsp70 class of heat shock proteins (Hsps) has been implicated at multiple points in the immune response of both vertebrates and invertebrates. This class of chaperones is highly conserved in both sequence and structure, from prokaryotes to higher eukaryotes. In view of their high degree of homology, it was assumed that these Hsp70 proteins derived either from the prokaryotes or eukaryotes w...

Artemia brine shrimps inhabit hypersaline ecosystems all over the world except Antarctica. In South America two bisexual diploid species are encountered: Artemia franciscana Kellogg distributed along America and Artemia persimilis Piccinelli and Prosdocimi restricted to Argentina and a few Chilean localities. A. franciscana was recently cited for the first time in our country and our results su...

Microtubules induced with taxol to assemble in cell-free extracts of the brine shrimp, Artemia, are cross-linked by microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs). When the MAPs, extracted from taxol-stabilized microtubules with 1 M-NaCl are co-assembled with purified Artemia or mammalian neural tubulin, reconstitution of cross-linking between microtubules occurs. The most prominent non-tubulin protein...

In this study the optimal amount of enriching Artemia franciscana with a synbiotic combination of Pediococcus acidilactici and fructooligosaccharide (FOS( was investigated. The experiment was conducted in a completely randomized design in ten treatments: multi-level probiotics P. acidilactici (1×109, 1×108 and 1× 107 CFU per L) and multi-level enriched prebiotic FOS (1, 2 and 5) g per L of solu...

The present study investigates the effects of different routes of inulin administration as prebiotic on gut microbiota and survival rate of Indian white shrimp post-larvae. Four hundred and fifty Indian white shrimp post-larvae (PL1) were stocked in nine tanks. The tanks were assigned into three treatments: feeding with inulin-treated (110 mg L(-1)) Artemia nauplii (I-T), feeding with inulin-en...

BACKGROUND To adapt to extreme environments, the crustacean Artemia has evolved two alternative reproductive pathways. During ovoviviparous (direct) development, nauplius larvae are produced. In contrast, Artemia females release encysted diapause embryos (cysts) via the oviparous pathway. To date, the cellular mechanisms that regulate stress resistance of Artemia remain largely unknown. Ste20-l...