The art of self-defense: morphological changes of Daphnia in response to the invasive predatory water flea, Bythotrephes

A tribute to Winfried Lampert: how he injected an integrative vision of evolutionary ecology into the aquatic sciences

“…Additionally, it was already known from earlier studies that predator-released chemicals can induce changes not only in behavior but also in morphology of planktonic organisms such as in ciliates, rotifers or Daphnia (summarized in Tollrian & Harvell 1999); see a number of contributions in this special issue (e.g. Horstmann et al 2022;Kiehnau & Weider 2022;Mikulski & Pijanowska 2022;Pijanowska et al 2022).…”

“…Different genotypes showed differences in their responses, and it was sometimes possible to relate the predator environment of a Daphnia clone (e.g., fishless ponds or lakes with strong fish predation, clones existing before and after introduction of fish) to the direction and strength of its responses to predator kairomones. The reaction to kairomones was a definite adaptive factor that differed between clones with different evolutionary histories (De Meester & Weider 1999;Kiehnau & Weider 2022).…”

“…(4) Evolutionary Ecology /Ecological Genetics Many of the research topics that have been highlighted in this tribute article, along with many of the papers in this special issue (Kerfoot & Boriss 2022;Kiehnau & Weider 2022;Pijanowska et al 2022) have a common theme of the importance of evolutionary processes that were stimulated by the positive and productive atmosphere that was generated at the MPIL under the longterm direction of Winfried Lampert. The vision and inter-connections of what Winfried achieved over the course of his career and his impact on aquatic/ecological science is seen not only in the primary literature that centered on field and laboratory experimentation, but also in the numerous invited review articles, books and special publications (see Stibor et al 2021 for an extended bibliography of Winfried Lampert's work).…”

“…In addition, the study of spatial and temporal population genetic structure of aquatic organisms was fostered in the Lampert group over the years (Lampert & Wolf 1986;Weider 1989;Zeller et al 2006Zeller et al , 2008, which expanded our knowledge of the underlying roles played by selection, drift, migration, and mutation in structuring these populations. This included the characterization and assessment of the importance of interspecific hybridization and introgression in these systems A further area of evolutionary ecology, termed "resurrection ecology" (Kiehnau & Weider 2022), was fully supported at the MPIL during the Lampert years, which resulted in a number of high-impact publications that examined temporal evolutionary dynamics in zooplankton (primarily Daphnia) systems (Weider et al 1997;Hairston et al 1999;Kerfoot et al 1999;Hairston et al 2001). This greatly expanded our ability to examine how organisms can respond to shifting environmental conditions over the course of decades (or even centuries -e.g.…”