Authors

Ishrat Durdana

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Abstract

Environmental changes are common in nature and are responsible for variables such as temperate and food quality. Daphnia ambigua are an integral part of aquatic ecosystems, providing food sources for aquatic life and keeping phytoplankton from overgrowing. Our goal was to manipulate food quality in order to observe generational and cross-generational effects on Daphnia. Existing clones from cultures in the lab were reared in a common garden setting for three generations in order to reduce extraneous variables. Food quality is a key aspect of development; therefore, it was manipulated in order to determine possible effects on clutch and body size. Results showed that Daphnia reared in a low quality food environment produced smaller clutch sizes and were bigger in size compared to those reared in the medium and high quality food treatments. On a broader scale these results demonstrate that food quality has an effect on Daphnia traits across generations.

Publication Date

5-1-2015

Language

English

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