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Clonal structure and depth selection during a Caullerya mesnili epidemic in a hybridizing population of the Daphnia longispina complex

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Abstract

Daphnia perform diel vertical migration (DVM), a predator-avoidance strategy to migrate towards deeper and colder layers in the water column in the morning and movement to the algae-rich surface layers in the evening. However, individuals performing DVM incur several trade-offs since they might suffer from resource limitation and a slower instantaneous birth rate in deeper depths. DVM patterns may be modified by abiotic factors such as temperature, food concentration, or pH and vary among different Daphnia species and genotypes. Furthermore, Daphnia host a variety of microparasites that might pose an additional factor influencing DVM behaviour. For infected individuals, migration into cooler temperature layers might slow down parasite growth. Moreover, parasites can increase opacity of their hosts. Non-migrating individuals might then be selectively purged from the upper layers by visually hunting predators. With these premises we asked, whether epidemics of the ichthyosporean parasite Caullerya mesnili affect or are affected by the DVM behaviour of Daphnia in Lake Greifensee, Switzerland by analysing the vertical distribution of Daphnia during day and night on two dates. Furthermore, we were interested whether a potential interaction depends on host genotype. We therefore studied the genotypic composition of the integrated population in regular sampling intervals over the course of one year and on a fine-grained vertical resolution during the Caullerya epidemic in late summer. Since Caullerya-infected Daphnia migrated equally well as uninfected ones, the findings of this study suggest that Caullerya epidemics neither affected nor were affected by the DVM behaviour of Daphnia. We observed clonal succession in the lake but could not link this succession to the Caullerya epidemic; all except one of the common multilocus genotypes were under-infected. In addition, outbreak and course of this Caullerya epidemic seemed to rely mainly on environmental cues. Because this first study only provides a snapshot of time, we hope that further studies will be done to verify our results.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Esther Keller for her support in the laboratory. We also thank Adam Petrusek and two anonymous reviewers for their high quality and detailed review report. This study was funded by grants from the Swiss Science Foundation (310030L_135750) to PS and by the Swiss Enlargement Contribution, Project IZERZ0–142165, “CyanoArchive”, in the framework of the Romanian-Swiss Research Program. CT was supported by an SNF Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship P2EZP3_148740.

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  1. Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, 8600, Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Nadine Tardent, Christoph Tellenbach, Patrick Turko & Piet Spaak

  2. Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Nadine Tardent, Christoph Tellenbach, Patrick Turko & Piet Spaak

  3. Environmental Genomics Group, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Christoph Tellenbach

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  1. Nadine Tardent
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Correspondence to Piet Spaak.

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Guest editors: Adam Petrusek & Piet Spaak / Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Cladocera

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Tardent, N., Tellenbach, C., Turko, P. et al. Clonal structure and depth selection during a Caullerya mesnili epidemic in a hybridizing population of the Daphnia longispina complex. Hydrobiologia 798, 33–44 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-015-2632-3

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