Chironomidae Morphological Types and Functional Feeding Groups as a Habitat Complexity Vestige

Abstract

Chironomid (Diptera: Chironomidae) larvae play an important role in a wide range of aquatic ecosystems. The study focuses on Chironomidae trophic guilds and morphological types as indicator traits in reconstructions of habitat changes in shallow water bodies. Mentum and ventromental plates are important mouthparts whose shape depends on food type and feeding behavior. Chironomidae larvae strongly vary in the mode of life and feeding habits, representing almost every feeding group. Here we classified the mentum types into 16 groups and tested if they indicated similar past habitat changes as the Chironomidae functional feeding groups (FFGs), and tribes/subfamilies. Paleoecological data of biotic and abiotic proxies were derived from short sequences from a Late Glacial oxbow and a nearby medieval moat located in Central Poland. The study revealed that the habitat substratum structure, vegetation and physicochemical conditions are associated both with the feeding types and morphological traits. This provides a valuable tool for future reconstructions of habitat changes.

Factors Controlling Morphotaxa Distributions of Diptera Chironomidae in Freshwaters

“…Diamesa Krenophilous morphotaxa, such as B. bifida and B. longifurca, Micropsectra atrofasciata, and Thienemanniella, were scattered in several cells (10, 14-16, 21-23) but were mostly in cells 14 and 22 (Figure 3). Krenophilous morphotaxa, such as B. bifida and B. longifurca, Micropsectra atrofasciata, and Thienemanniella, were scattered in several cells (10,(14)(15)(16)(21)(22)(23) but were mostly in cells 14 and 22 (Figure 3). Many morphotaxa, such as Euorthocladius, Tvetenia, Synorthocladius semivirens, and Eukiefferiella claripennis, were present in several cells characterizing rhithral (cells 1, 7-9, 14-15) (Figure 4).…”

“…To avoid the difficulties in describing the relations between abiotic factors and chironomids, the functional feeding groups have also been used [7]. More recently, the concept of morphological type [15] has been also proposed to separate different clusters of taxa. These clusters were applied to species with different feeding habits or with different head capsule morphology, disregarding any phylogenetic consideration, but often the membership of a taxon is arbitrarily assigned to one of these groups, and the fact that different instars belong to different functional groups is ignored [4].…”

Searching for Function: Reconstructing Adaptive Niche Changes Using Geochemical and Morphological Data in Planktonic Foraminifera

“…Taxon-free traits are a specific class of traits that transcend taxonomic classification and provide a commonality to allow comparisons across communities in different climatic and geographical settings (McGill et al, 2006). Often these traits are phenotypic such as dental morphology (e.g., Renaud et al, 2005;Žliobaitë et al, 2016;Oksanen et al, 2019;McGuire and Lauer, 2020), overall body geometry (Bregman et al, 2014;Pimiento et al, 2017;Macumber et al, 2020;Antczak-Orlewska et al, 2021;Di Martino and Liow, 2021) and, in our study system planktonic foraminifera, test morphology (Baumfalk et al, 1987;Huber et al, 1997;Renaud and Schmidt, 2003;Schmidt et al, 2004Schmidt et al, , 2006Payne et al, 2012;Rego et al, 2012;Weinkauf et al, 2014Weinkauf et al, , 2019Weiner et al, 2015;Brombacher et al, 2017;Kucera et al, 2017). Traits can also include ecological traits like habitat (Bregman et al, 2014;Pimiento et al, 2017) and feeding behavior (Bregman et al, 2014).…”

robustHD: An R package for robust regression with high-dimensional data

“…Package robustHD therefore provides researchers with access to several popular methods for robust regression and variable selection with high-dimensional data. It has been used in many benchmarking studies in the statistical literature (e.g., Chang et al, 2018;Cohen Freue et al, 2019;Kurnaz et al, 2018b;Smucler & Yohai, 2017), as well as in empirical research (e.g., Antczak-Orlewska et al, 2021;Stadlbauer et al, 2020).…”