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Food quality often has profound effects on life history traits and individual fitness, altering rates of growth and development, changing the timing of reproduction, and shifting the trade‐off between egg size and egg number. Few data are available on the effects of food quality on copepod life history traits. We measured several life history traits on a large number of individuals to document the effects of food quality on individual traits, on life history correlates, and on a composite measure of individual fitness in the freshwater copepod Boeckella triarticulata Thomson. Nauplii were raised individually on two diets: one consisted of the high quality alga Cryptomonas sp. (abbreviated as CR), and the second diet consisted of a combination of Cryptomonas sp. and the low quality cyanobacterium Anabaena flos‐aquae (CA). The mixed CA diet slowed growth and development so that individuals raised on this diet were older and smaller at metamorphosis and maturity. Despite these effects, there were no differences between diets in survival to maturity, and male copepods raised on the mixed diet lived significantly longer than females or than either sex raised on Cryptomonas alone. Females raised on the mixed diet produced more and larger clutches than those raised on CR, so that total egg production increased on this diet, although large intradiet variation obscured statistical differences between diets in these parameters. Intradiet variation was due to a large range in the number of clutches produced by individual females: some individuals produced 10–15 clutches, contradicting previous descriptions of this species as semelparous. Although diet affected age at first reproduction, it had no significant effect on individual fitness, estimated as λ. Boeckella triarticulata achieved high fitness either by minimizing age at first reproduction (CR diet) or by increasing reproductive output (CA diet). Data collected from cast‐off exuviae allow nondestructive measures of individual life history traits along with a composite measure of individual fitness. Combining these two analyses is an important step in unraveling life history correlates and in identifying the selective forces driving life history evolution in these crustaceans.