Resurrected past-century Ceriodaphnia quadrangula highlight  differences between pheno- and genotypic expressions

• The hatching of cladoceran ephippia from a 15 cm long sediment core was investigated, and Ceriodaphnia quadrangula -clones were isolated from different sediment layers. Bosmina-microfossil data were also analyzed, and compared with the corresponding data from a Pb210-dated core, which allowed us to infer the age of the sediment-layers. Using changes in Bosmina-microfossil morphologies, we were furthermore able to infer the presence of different regimes of fish-predation. C. quadrangula was found to hatch in layers with an inferred age of approximately a century. Newly hatched individuals had smaller eye-size in sediment layers corresponding to high predation by young-of-the-year perch. Newly hatched individuals also generally had a marked neck-spine. In contrast, morphological characters of C. quadrangula -clones reared in the laboratory over several generations showed no variation in relation to predation regime, indicating the absence of fixed genotype-level changes. Furthermore, the laboratory-grown clones only rarely produced a neck-spine. The results suggest phenotypic variation in response to the regime under which ephippia were produced.

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limnologi

Limnology

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