While collecting material for my PhD research I had the great good luck to meet Paul Hebert from the University of Windsor. He was already on the way to becoming a pre-eminent cladoceran geneticist (although when I spoke to him last week he said he hadn’t looked at one in years). His lab unraveled many [...]
Archive for October, 2008
Parthenogenesis Askew
Posted in Ecology, Environment, tagged Daphnia, females, males, Paul Hebert, population genetics, vernal ponds on October 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Cladocerology for salamander lovers
Posted in Ecology, Environment, tagged cladocerans, copepods, parthenogenesis, salamanders, vernal ponds, zooplankton on October 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The next few, or many, posts are going to be about cladoceran reproduction. An obvious question is why spend so much time writing about the sex life of this tiny crustacean? What does cladoceran sex have to do with vernal pools? I think it tells us quite a bit actually and speaks yet again to [...]
The Right Stuff
Posted in Ecology, Environment, tagged Daphnia, DNA, meiosis, mitosis, vernal ponds on October 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Growing up in a vernal pond is about more than just avoiding being eaten. Once a cladoceran reaches maturity it starts to produce daughters. It does this through a process called parthenogenesis. The ability to produce offspring without a mate is one of the physiological features that unite cladocerans. It is not all that uncommon [...]
Do I Look Good in This Crest?
Posted in Ecology, Environment, tagged Daphnia, predators, prey, vernal ponds, water on October 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
One of the most interesting aspects of the Daphnia – Chaoborus interaction is the specificity of the response. Only those Daphnia species most intimate with the predator are induced, and even then, only the instars of the appropriate size to be fed on. This speaks to the idea that such a defense has a cost, [...]
Juvenile Defense
Posted in Ecology, Environment, tagged vernal pools, zooplankton, Daphnia, vernal ponds, Chaoborus, cladoceran, predator induced defenses on October 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I left off with the idea that growing up in a vernal pond is not necessarily straightforward. Depending on the presence of particular predators, juvenile Daphnia can alter their shape, a phenomenon termed predator induced defense. In Daphnia pulex it takes the form of neck teeth or nachenzahne (I’d include a picture but I couldn’t [...]
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