Growing Up

I know it took a while to get through hatching a resting egg, but a new a new baby Daphnia has finally been hatched.  The growing up part of the Daphnia life cycle is almost simple.  The newborn will go through 4 molts (5 instars) over the next week or so and by the fifth [...]

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From The Bottom Up: For Salamander Lovers

My last topic regarding resting eggs is what triggers their hatch.  This esoteric topic has important consequences for pond conservation. The triggers remain far from clear but involve some combination of dark, light, temperature, drying, and oxygen as well as the carbohydrate trehalose. If this sounds unclear, it is.
I studied Daphnia hatching [...]

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When The Wait Is Over

Before I get back to the life history of Daphnia, I want to finish two more lines of thought on resting eggs (who knew there was so much to say about resting eggs?).  I mentioned in my previous post an experiment where I monitored the hatching of five types of pond zooplankton from sediment.  I [...]

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Waiting Is The Hardest Part

The fact that resting eggs remain viable in pond sediment or leaf litter is analogous to seeds in the soil.  Botanists discuss the seed bank, all the seeds in the soil waiting to germinate and pond scientists discuss the egg bank, all the pond animal eggs waiting to hatch.  There are eggs from planktonic animals, [...]

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Resting and Waiting

Timing is everything in a short lived habitat.  That was the moral of my last couple of posts.  I’ll keep on that theme and start to describe the life cycle of Daphnia, in particular those species that live in ponds.  I make this distinction because pond and lakes species, while sharing some elements, are also [...]

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Short Timers

In my last post I started a story with the point being that vernal ponds are complex in time as well as structure and chemistry. Collecting zooplankton in early March I came across a species of Daphnia unknown to anyone in our lab. Left on a lab bench overnight, all the animals died. [...]

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Time Scales

So far I have tried to explain how the interactions of animals living in vernal ponds demonstrate the physical and chemical complexity of their habitat.  I’m going to stick with the theme of complexity but switch to the dimension of time. Three months is a long time to organisms with a life span measured in [...]

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The Solution Revealed. 4.

Before leaving the topic of the predator Hydra I need to recount one last story.  The fourth part of my trilogy on my aquarium observations, if you will.  While I was doing the experiments dragging crushed zooplankton through the tentacles of Hydra, I tried many different species of potential prey.  All but one caused Hydra [...]

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The Solution Revealed. 3.

I’ve been explaining my rationale for my lab observation involving three common vernal pool inhabitants, the micro-crustacean cladocerans Daphnia and Simocephalus, and their predator Hydra.  I explained that Daphnia, living in the open water, rarely encounter Hydra and so have no defenses from the predator.  You could argue that staying in the open water is [...]

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The Mona Lisa And Wetlands

Readers of my posts are probably unaware that I write two blogs. “What Matters To Me” covers anything that interests me and “Life In Shallow Waters” is about my affection for vernal pools (wetlands). The topics are distinctly different. Until now. I am posting this in both blogs because it is [...]

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