Abstract
Survival of natural Daphnia populations without previous acclimatization in filtered water under laboratory conditions (starvation) was used as a parameter describing the actual competitive ability of populations in periods of food limitation. Two populations (1 and 2) of Daphnia pulicaria Forbes coming from two enclosures with a low (< 1 mgC l−1) and a high (about 3 mgC l−1) seston level were examined in their resistance to starvation. Juveniles of both populations survived better than adult females in the conditions without seston as well as in the control experiment, despite their much lower biomass. Animals from population 1 had lower mortality than those from population 2 in all variants of the experiment. The results confirm the hypothesis that the ability of daphnids to starve depends also on adaptation to previous feeding conditions.
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Stuchlíková, Z. Effect of previous feeding conditions on survival in Daphnia pulicaria (Crustacea: Cladocera). Hydrobiologia 225, 177–183 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00028395
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00028395