Bioenergetic cost of living in polluted freshwater bodies: respiration rates of the cyclopoid Eucyclops serrulatus under ammonia-N exposures

Effect of Temperature Rising on the Stygobitic Crustacean Species Diacyclops belgicus: Does Global Warming Affect Groundwater Populations?

“…As high metabolic rates are expected to increase the influx rate of toxicants in aquatic crustaceans [27,44,56], the invariability of the SRRs between 14 and 17 • C may be considered protective to this species. In addition, the absence of SRR variability suggests that the survival of D. belgicus at a temperature of 1.1 • C above the highest measured in the Medio Valdarno porous aquifer does not depend on the ability of this species to satisfy its aerobic metabolic demand [57].…”

“…Eighteen hours before the trial at 14 • C the copepods were rinsed in standard water (1 L of MILLIPORE MILLI-Q ® (Elix ® , Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany) deionized water remineralized with the following reagent grade chemicals: 0.06 g of MgSO 4 , 0.096 g of NaHCO 3 , 0.004 g of KCl, 0.06 g of CaSO 4 ·2H 2 O; [25]) and kept in a 10-mL glass vial with standard water and in the darkness at the testing temperature. No food was offered during acclimation in order to allow gut-emptying [26,27]. After the acclimation, only the actively swimming individuals were selected for testing.…”

“…The test individuals (juvenile stages, i.e., copepodids) were picked up by a glass pipette under a Leica M80 stereomicroscope at 20× magnification. The pick-up of fecal pellets was carefully avoided so to exclude the overshoot in oxygen consumption due to digestive metabolism [20,26,27]. The respirometric measurements were started on the day 8th for the trials at 14 • C. The whole procedure (collection of new animals from the field, acclimation in bore water and in standard water and testing) was repeated for the trial at 17 • C at the day 9th.…”

“…The camera was connected to a notebook and the pictures were elaborated by LAS EZ vs. 3 software (Leica Microsystems Srl, Wetzlar, Germany) and the free vector graphic software Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/it/). The prosome length (L, mm) and width (W, mm) of each individual were measured using the methods described in our previous studies [26,27]. Dry mass was calculated according to [30]:…”

Towards an integrated understanding of how micro scale processes shape groundwater ecosystem functions

“…There is no ultimate reason why groundwater metazoa might not use similar strategies, of course not in a free swim, but using unfavourable or even toxic zones briefly in search for food, and then recovering to more favourable zones. The few groundwater taxa used in ecotoxicological studies so far have proven to show a different pattern to that of their surface relatives (Avramov et al, 2013;Cifoni et al, 2017;Di Lorenzo et al, 2016;Hose et al, 2016;Mösslacher, 2000), being more sensitive towards stressors than their surface relatives, or less sensitive. Thus, metazoa very much depend on what is happening on the micro scale.…”