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Nutritional and toxicity constraints of phytoplankton from a Brazilian reservoir to the fitness of cladoceran species

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Abstract

Camorim is a small, eutrophic reservoir in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a phytoplankton community dominated most of the year by the filamentous diatom Aulacoseira spp. and the toxic cyanobacterium Cylindrospermopsis raciborskii. As filamentous species can be a poor food for grazers, we hypothesize that phytoplankton from this reservoir would constrain cladoceran fitness due to nutritional limitation and/or toxicity when animals fed mixtures of cultured green algae and natural seston. Clones of different cladoceran species were exposed either to seston from Camorim reservoir sampled in different seasons or to a C. raciborskii strain (CYLCAM-2) isolated from the reservoir. In short-term assays, cladocerans were exposed to either 100% seston or mixtures of 50% seston added to green algae (200 μg C L−1), and their survivorship and somatic growth were measured for 4 days. In life table assays, neonates were exposed to the same seston treatments over 14 days and age at first reproduction, survivorship, fecundity, total offspring, and the intrinsic rate of natural increase (r) were assessed. In general, seston negatively affected cladoceran survivorship and fitness (r), but this response was seasonally and species specific. Stronger effects of CYLCAM-2 than those caused by seston on survivorship, somatic growth, and r were found for all cladoceran species, especially when the proportion of CYLCAM-2 was higher than 50% in relation to green algae in a fixed total food concentration. Our results suggest that both nutritional (C/P and morphology) and toxicity factors can act to impair cladoceran fitness and help explain the absence of cladocerans in Camorim reservoir.

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Acknowledgments

We like to thank the State Water Plant Company (Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos do Rio de Janeiro, CEDAE) and the environmental agency (Instituto Estadual do Ambiente (INEA)) for the logistic support and license, respectively, to conduct this study. We also thank Gabriele Estevão, Marcella Coelho, Leonardo de Magalhães, Márcio Costa, and Tassiana Pereira for their help in the field and Fábio Abreu for maintaing the lab cultures.

Funding

This study is financially supported by the Brazilian National Science Council (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)) (Universal 486339/2011-4).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Avaliação e Promoção da Saúde Ambiental, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, FIOCRUZ, Av. Brasil, 4365—Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21040-360, Brazil

    Aloysio da S. Ferrão-Filho & José Augusto A. dos Santos

  2. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Biológicas (Biodiversidade Neotropical), Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Av. Pasteur 458, Urca, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22290-040, Brazil

    Tatiane M. Dias

  3. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Biológicas, Departamento de Botânica, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21940-590, Brazil

    Uanderson J. Pereira

  4. Departamento de Ecologia e Recursos Marinhos, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Av. Pasteur 458, Urca, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22290-040, Brazil

    Betina Kozlowsky-Suzuki

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  1. Aloysio da S. Ferrão-Filho
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  2. Tatiane M. Dias
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Correspondence to Betina Kozlowsky-Suzuki.

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Ferrão-Filho, A.d.S., Dias, T.M., Pereira, U.J. et al. Nutritional and toxicity constraints of phytoplankton from a Brazilian reservoir to the fitness of cladoceran species. Environ Sci Pollut Res 26, 12881–12893 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-04851-6

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