Transcriptomic response of Daphnia magna to nitrogen‐ or phosphorus‐limited diet

Abstract

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Ecological response of Rotaria rotatoria (Bdelloid Rotifera) to unbalanced nitrogen in food: experimental insights from life history strategy and feeding behavior

“…Growth, reproduction and grazing rates are interdependent, leading herbivorous zooplankton to benefit from the enhancement of phytoplankton intake in the absence of food limitations (Rinke and Vijverberg 2005; Ashforth and Yan 2008). In response to inadequate nutrient supply, zooplankton can also amplify their feeding ability to compensate for deficiencies in essential elements (Hillebrand et al 2009; Xu et al 2021). In this study, rotifers fed with N-free algal food showed a significant increase in grazing and filtration rates, which indicates that rotifers can compensate for nutrient limitation by enhancing their feeding behavior.…”

“…Further, Urabe et al (2018) and Branco et al (2018) suggested that zooplankton applied several strategies, such as grazing rate enhancement, increased assimilation efficiency and selective grazing, to adapt to low food quality. Most interestingly, Daphnia magna showed a higher ingestion rate when consuming N-limited algae, and there was a corresponding overexpression of genes encoding digestive enzymes, indicating compensatory feeding (Xu et al 2021). Nevertheless, research remains scarce regarding life history strategies, particularly in developmental duration and feeding behavior of rotifers that feed on N-limited phytoplankton.…”

“…Most ecological stoichiometry investigations in terrestrial systems have focused on N, while investigations in freshwater systems frequently highlight the significance of P (Hessen et al 2013;Zhou and Declerck 2021). To the best of our knowledge, investigations of nitrogen stoichiometry in aquatic ecosystems mostly involved field studies of rotifer community structure in limited or unbalanced nutrition conditions (Błędzki and Ellison 1998;Bergström et al 2018Bergström et al , 2021Błędzki et al 2018Błędzki et al , 2020Zhang et al 2022), and laboratory studies of the responses of physiological processes and population dynamics to different nutritional compositions of food sources (Frost et al 2005;Štrojsová et al 2009;Xu et al 2021). Given that N is a vital element to various life forms (Follett and Hatfield 2001;Liu et al 2011), it is imperative to understand the potential impacts of unbalanced N on various aquatic trophic levels.…”